I Made a Viral Painting to "Prove it's Not Luck"

I've spent the past month trying to answer the number one asked question in the world. Can somebody with zero art experience buy the largest canvas they can find, make a ridiculous painting, make it go viral, and convince somebody that this is worth a generous amount of cash? Number one asked question. This is serious. People say art is a dying industry. Art is dead. Artists are dying. Man, what are these artists doing? It sounded like the industry was in serious need of me. But what art did I make? How did people even find out about it? And how much was the painting going Hey, there's only one way to find out. One day I was enjoying the morning sun by scrolling on Instagram, and after some serious grinding, I found what might be the most beautiful photograph I've ever seen. Oh, okay. Oh, uh, that's me. A man by the name of Max Evasion posted a photo of this painting here. Right, cool. What is this? Okay, if you have under 10 hours of screen time on your phone, I wouldn't expect you to get this. This is Niche Sun Baby Meme. And if you've got your eyes screwed on, you'll also realize this baby's body belongs to a very important baby in pop culture. Niche baby, Nirvana album cover baby, weirdly placed on canvas in a weird color. It's genius. But just you wait, it gets crazier. He managed to sell this painting for $86,000. To whom, you may ask? Saul Goodman. I'm not even joking. He sold it to Bob Odenkirk for $86,000. When I heard this news, I was inspired. I was so inspired I even went to I decided to message him about his inspirationalness, to which he responded with— he does not care. I was inspired nonetheless, but the truth is I still had to come up with an idea for the thing. This is probably hard for some people, but not me. I got put in the special drawing room in school because I was severely artistic. They must have really valued me as a student. So the next day, after my morning bubbly bath and cigar, I got to thinking using my brain. I like how he used the fact that this meme is well known to generate Viewage. People often shrug off this as internet nonsense, but let's be honest: all this nonsense is people's time and brain energy, which is valuable. And what face is more recognizable than any other face on the internet? Me and my. Okay, if you've been scrolling recently, oh man, that's a huge hole. You will have seen this face here. If not, this right here. This is my base. And after some serious hard work drawing on my. This is what I came up with. A strange color for a canvas. Some kind of spotlight or something to make it interesting. Speed's face placed weirdly on a canvas. It's genius. There was nothing left to do but— Art shopping time! Art shopping! Paint. Shopping list. Shopping cart that you can also use as a basket. I can't actually focus on what I need to buy because I'm filming at the same time. This trip ended up taking me 37 minutes. That's pretty bad. But I logged in, I got every single thing that I needed to. Is it all? Alright, thanks very much. And I headed home, meaning I literally had no excuse not to paint anymore. It's time to, you know, get— it's time to paint. I kind of feel like I'm dressed a little bit like a painter. I got on this jumper, ready for painting and cuddles and things, other things painters do. I'm so ready. But despite my extensive experience, I still needed to figure out how to start. Okay, here's what I need to do. Go back to the shop I was just at and pick up this thing called gesso, which is a primer Whatever that means. I had to get changed out of my ridiculous cozy jumper to avoid something called paint on jumper, and got busy with the canvas unveiling its white canvasy beauty. I absolutely covered it in white goo, and after it was completely glazed, I wait 45 minutes and it should be dry, giving me plenty of time to do important things such as YouTube Shorts. It's now the evening. It's like 9 p.m. I started doing this thing at 4 p.m. Looks good. I don't really know what the point of this. Cool. Well, that's fine. Okay, I think I can say with confidence the prep is done. So now I'm on to the first real step, which is— okay, now I need to do a layer of gray paint. Let's hope it all doesn't take this long. In order to get that exact gray color I want, I need a large mixing palette, some ultramarine paint, and then the obvious black and white paint. So I kind of mixed it until it looked gray and then put it on my canvas. I ended up doing a few layers. It was a lot of the same stuff, you know, you paint and then you wait for a bit and then you have to paint again and you wait for a bit. I was doing this until about 1 AM till I decided it was time for beddy-byes. Look at this. This is very gray. Looking sweet, am I right? You know, it's just, just gray. It was time to paint the spotlight. Now, I don't know why I picked a spotlight. It probably would have been easier to do something abstract like loads of multicolored straight lines or something, but spotlight just seemed to be more on theme. And all I know about Making a spotlight is it needs a gradient. When a color changes to another color, which, you know, shouldn't be too difficult, right? Before you do any painting, you should always plan it out on paper first and then ease into it slowly. I had this small canvas that I'd use for practicing. I thought I'd mix the ultramarine with some white. I was told a sponge for this one would be the best move to try and get that smooth gradient. Blob in the middle, and then I thought I'd slowly try and make it weaker as it went outside of that blob. Clearly I was doing something wrong. Let's try that again. This is kinda working. This is kinda work— And then I remembered the ingenious strategy all painters do, at least sometimes, at some point. Finger painting! I literally thought I found the secret to the universe. I mean, look at this smooth gradient. This is crazy. So with my newfound confidence, I got back to the paintbrush. I gave up. It was back to the drawing board for me. I had to order a few things on Amazon and wait for them to come before I started doing the gradient once more. Okay, well, that failed. I failed. Failure. So while I'm waiting for that stuff to deliver and trying to avoid the gaze of my failed blending attempt, I need to figure out how I'm gonna trace this massive mural of IShowSpeed bald doing the face. Luckily, due to my massive brain, I did manage to get a big sheet of tracing paper. But the main question remains, how am I gonna trace this massive painting in the first place? I mean, it's not like I have a huge flat traceable kissable lightbox in my apartment, do I? You do! Nice! Uploaded the picture to my PC, and with a few cables attached here and there, I had this glorious shiny bald head on my TV screen. To attach the tracing paper on the TV, I used a technique called tape and went to town. Look at me go! Yeah, first step completed! First step completed! Where are my mics? It's coming. Stuff's all right. Stuff haul! Soft paintbrush, blending brushes for blending, mixing cups, some gray paint to visualize. With all this brand new stuff, I really thought it'd change the outcome. But is learning how to perfectly blend paint in one day a realistic goal to set? The multiple different techniques I tried answered that question incredibly swiftly. So you'd think I'd be feeling pretty panicked by now, and I would if I didn't have a little backup plan up my sleeve. So after I'd covered my canvas fully gray, the waiting began. So I need something that I could both keep the gray on the background and keep that nice fade pattern with the white. But I came to a solution: spray paint. You can use it to make a gradient. The shop that I always go to also gave me some cups for free, so I think they're taking a liking to me. But spray paint's dangerous, man, so I'm gonna have to clean this entire— This is the canvas that I painted fully with just some gray. Oh, uh, newspaper. It's time. I thought a white blob to start with would help make the gradient smoother, and pretty much instantly it became clear that spray paint was a solid option. You can see a pretty clear gradient at the bottom. I think if I had a big canvas and I just got to it, I think it'd be fine. Sorry, what was that? It's not that smooth? It's the best option I've got. I think I let my impatience get the better of me. After I did a rough trace onto the painting, I got excited and might have gone a little crazy with the white. Yes, okay, maybe it's not a great spotlight, but it still grabs the attention like a spotlight would. Let's see what I had to say about it at the time. Looks kind of cool. I actually quite like this, like a sun. Yeah, I don't really know. Amazing! The moment of truth. One big lad, one big dream, one big forehead on one big canvas. It was finally time to paint this bad boy. His golden globe was traced back onto the canvas and my painting hand was at the ready. My hand has become so strong. We mustn't mess up. One single mistake on this canvas would make me upset, cause the death of 13 cows, and I'd have to start again. All right, painting time again. Ooooooooh. I don't know why I'm trying to be so aesthetic. This was fun. I'm having fun. Whoa, painting fun. This is a good time. Anyone else want to join? Having a good time. It was finally done. My proudest moment, best day of my life, my baby girl. I don't know what else to say. This turned out good, man. Yeah, I don't know, this is kind of funny. Of course, now I want to relax, go to the Winchester, and wait for this all to blow over. But the journey's not over yet. I still somehow need to sell this thing, which is, I think, the most difficult Part about art. You could have an amazing painting, but if it sits in your attic, how are we gonna sell it? So after looking through the entire Pinterest catalog, I asked my friend Ed, who's a photographer, to help out. He said yes. Thanks, Ed! I acquired my best outfit, partially to seduce him as well, picked up a chair, my beautiful painting. I forgot to bring my camera, but this is going amazingly. The idea behind this was taking the painting somewhere it's not supposed to be, wearing something you wouldn't usually wear, and sit next to the painting in this place. It's pretty complicated. But as we took these photographs, people kept trying to get involved. Oh, I see. It's good? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm very happy. Like, like, like owners? Yeah, yeah. It was really reaching people. After what felt like a huge success, the only thing left was to wait for Ed to edit the photos. Everyone comment thanks Ed for a pint of garlic soup. And I made a little teaser video to post first as an intro. Please be— I need this! A tiny issue is I don't know what to call it. But who better to decide than the people themselves? Okay, here we go. Alright, it is 5 PM, uh, meaning it's time to post. I'm actually nervous. Please be ugly! It's up. These videos did really badly. I don't think many people believe this painting is gonna do well. That being said, someone did comment, tickle me please. I'm pretty sure they were just commenting because they want me to tickle them. I get a lot of these kind of comments, but they have no idea that this is actually gonna be the name of the painting. Oh, the video was posted yesterday. I thought I'd give it a day. On TikTok, this got 1,300 likes, and on Instagram, this got 3,675 likes. I may need to rethink. I can't give up on it yet. I'm gonna have to guerrilla market this thing. We already have the photos that we haven't posted yet. Those pictures are not gonna cut it. I needed to give it lore. Video crafted. I explained the painting, called myself Picasso again, you know, as you do. And only I in the same day could take some professional pictures for the eBay. Okay, there we go. Tickle me please original acrylic painting on canvas 2026. Starting bid 1 pence. And, uh, I already posted this video. Let's see the analytics of it all. If I'm being honest, these videos didn't do as well as I hoped. And I already set the start date of my auction 3 days from now. But at this point, I don't really feel the pressure. I need one of these. I cannot explain why. I made an Instagram story, crossed my fingers, and nobody was responding. Today is the day. Today— At 5 PM, I posted up the photos on Instagram, TikTok, OnlyFans, and YouTube, linked the eBay in my bio, and then at 6:59, just before it was posted, I released the stories. I fell asleep for 2 days. Come on, sleeping for 2 days? This is not possible. But I actually haven't checked it. 2 days, no notifications, no messages. But it means I can react for the first time with you guys. Okay, it's on this one here. My reaction may seem a little weird right now, but that number— there's no way someone's actually gonna pay that. Ollie95504, that's his name. When I think of Ollie, I think of this guy, because like $400, I'd be like, okay, $6,700? I have an idea. Basically, all the videos that are on my For You page at the moment kind of look a little bit like this. Highly intellectual stuff. What they're doing is they're replicating old memes and stuff like that because Memes recognizable, and you recreate them in real life. One of the best images I've ever seen in my life is this image here. It's a minion on a hoverboard, and I have just the baby to replicate. Get ready with me, guys. Over here we have some blue dungarees. Looking true, looking blue. Yellow jump shoes. It'll all make sense in a sec. We also have Ed with us to help us film this masterpiece. Say hi, Ed. On Instagram, the video hit 1 million views and over 100,000 likes within one day. This means overall everything. Across all platforms has generated 5 million views. The final day has arrived. The auction ends in 35 minutes. This watch doesn't work. And the auction is currently at £10,100. By the looks of it, while we were filming, some guy called Kieran3 bidded £10,100. This is because Kieran3 obviously knows good artwork and is a genius. There's nothing left to do. We're just gonna have to wait and see. And as the countdown slowly came closer to finishing, I began to reflect. All this time I'd spent painting, all the wonderful people I'd met. Is it all done now? All the time I'd spent planning and executing stupid little videos, it all boiled down to this. And all I could do was wait for the clock to slowly end. Something bad might have happened. As I was celebrating my amazing win, I saw a little message from someone called Kieran3 at 5:54. He messaged me 6 minutes before it ended. And after I found out this news and after I posted a couple angry Instagram posts, I was genuinely kind of stuck. Stuck. I kind of thought this thing might be a little bit too good to be true, but come on! Yes, he's not paying for it, but we took this painting all the way to £10,100. What does this say? I'm not sure. It shows that there is real value in people's attention and recognition. Oh, a little bit of teleport action. I cannot spend any more time preying on the inevitable downfall of Kieran 3. I am not Not canceling his order. After a while, I got sick of wrestling Kieran 3's profile picture and decided to make a change. I tried messaging the second highest bidder and the third to see if they were interested, but they never responded. It was just like being on medication. I miss you, Paul. You'd know what to do. Well, by the end of this, we learn an important lesson. Maybe you make a painting, maybe you don't. Maybe you sell the paintwork, maybe you don't. At the end of the day, it all comes down to if Kieran wants it or not. This time, Kieran didn't want it, but the internet, they wanted it.