Our Brown Bag Manchester based Background Artist Larisa Bumb has been participating in a hashtag challenge that prompts artists to redraw other artist's characters in their own style. Check out her work below and get involved with #drawthisinyourstyle!

Larisa: I was one of the three people doing this challenge when it first started. The original creator of the challenge is Marine Vernhes and I think it was being used by both of us and Sophie Gallo (who is also working at Brown Bag Manchester!) around the time it became a big deal. For some reason my character Milke went a bit viral!

I started the challenge to celebrate reaching 6K followers on Instagram and I saw these two ladies were involved and inspired as I was by their work, I thought it would be fun to try it myself, but never expected to have such a reach!

Several weeks ago, I decided, as a BG and environments artist, to stop focusing only on the character designs per se, and try to give my work more context, so I took this challenge as a chance to place those characters into a BG or set scene and actually tell a story with it.

I've done a few pieces for the challenge, as many as I could after work hours, but my faves so far are the ones below. This one is the one I like the most so far, I did it for the amazing Loish, whose original drawing you can view here. I imagined her character as an adventurer on a mineral mine, just finding some sort of new, pink, bright mineral.

This one was for my friend and artist Shycheeks, whose original can be seen here. I imagined her little witch making her potions and how her room would be just filled with plants and flowers.

And this one was for Cam (@yu.pls), whose work I love a lot too and her original piece can be seen here. I just thought the colors and style reminded me a lot of Frida Kahlo, so I took a shot from the movie and worked with that composition as inspiration for the setting for Cam's character.

What I like most is telling stories, and for me, colors, backgrounds and composition just bring a lot more to the characters and how we understand them and their stories, personalities, etc.

The #drawthisinyourstyle challenge brings along a lot of visibility. Everyone that's been involved with it has ended up getting to know a lot of new artists and gaining more visibility themselves. I've seen a lot of my artist friends going from 3K to 10K followers easily in only two weeks!

It's also a challenging activity to draw someone else's character and bring to it your own point of view or, as in my case, trying to add something else to it, like backgrounds. I've also seen other people doing short animations or even 3D models of my own characters, and I honestly think it's just incredibly impressive! It can literally be done using any technique and/or media, and it's great motivation to do something new and different style-wise.

To get started with it, I would advise pinning all the characters you want to draw in an Instagram collection so you can place them and of course, putting a lot of love into their crafting.

But especially, remember to tag and mention the original artist in the post, because for those who have massive amounts of people liking their stuff, the notifications get lost (Instagram has a certain limit of notifications to show you) and it can be difficult to keep track of every single drawing.

I'd also recommend to carefully use the original artists hashtag because while many people use only the main one, which is #drawthisinyourstyle, there are so many characters to draw now, it can and will get lost.

I've got SO MANY favourites from other artists!! I especially enjoyed seeing Loish, Tom Willtell, Izzy Burton (which I still have to do!), Ditta Puhoi, Albabbgg, Nat Morillo's… I would never finish my list, they all did amazing versions and, of course, I loved each and every one of the drawings people did of my own character, Milke (see on Instagram: #larapicklechallenge, Twitter: #larapicklechallenge). I honestly felt humbled and honored to be so lucky and have so many people enjoying my work and giving their own points of view to a character I designed!

If you want to get involved join me over on instagram @larapickle, or twitter @Larapic and use the #drawthisinyourstyle!