Art Student Owl

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Part of a series on Advice Animals. [View Related Entries]

About

Art Student Owl is an advice animal image macro series featuring an owl with a cigarette in its mouth. The overlaid text typically makes fun of art student stereotypes or conveys frustrations commonly shared by artists and students in art school.

Origin

The series is believed to have originated from the single topic blog Fuck Yeah Art Student Owl^[1], which was launched by School of Visual Arts student and Tumblr user Kendra on February 22nd, 2011. The first image posted on the blog was captioned with "this product is known to be carcinogenic, better paint with it":

Spread

A discussion thread about Kendra's Art Student Owl blog was posted on the Sweatdrop Manga Studio^[2] Forums on February 28th and an article written by Jay Hathaway titled "Art Student Owl – New Advice Meme Alert" was published via Urlesque^[3] on March 3rd. Throughout March 2011, the Tumblr blog continued to pick up mentions through the grapevines of art-related and personal blogs on Tumblr^[5] and Blogspot, such as Joanne Casey's I Have Seen the Whole of the Internet^[9], Steve Stenzel's My Photo Life^[10] and Lost Apples^[13] among many others. Additional derivatives can be found on various image-sharing communities and humor sites including Memebase^[4] and the /r/AdviceAnimals subreddit^[6], as well as on the Facebook fan page^[7] which was launched on April 25th, 2011 and has gained more than 1,700 likes as of September 2012. An article explaining the advice animal series was submitted to the meme documentation site Oh Internet^[11] on May 23rd.

Notable Examples

Derivative: Art Newbie Owl

"Art Newbie Owl" is a spin-off advice animal character derived from Art Student Owl, which is meant to parody stereotypes of people that are novices to the art world, and often pokes fun at those that exclusively want to draw anime style. The Fuck Yeah Art Newbie Owl^[8] Tumblr was created on March 2nd, 2011.