Web Video / Drawfee

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Have you ever wondered what Legendary Cheeses might look like? How about the Raddest Dads? Robots Built by Cavemen? The World's Sexiest Drawing? Dark Souls bosses drawn by people who've never heard of them? Have you ever wished someone would illustrate your favorite pop, emo, or Taylor Swift lyrics? Then boy have we got the thing for you!

Originating as a miniseries for CollegeHumor called Morning Drawfee, and eventually taking on a life of its own as The Drawfee Channel, Drawfee is a YouTube show wherein a number of artists and illustrators get together to create original drawings based on suggestions from the audience. Although the artists do get the general topic for each video in advance, they always start from scratch, and the viewer gets to follow their work as it slowly develops over the course of the episode. There are also special "challenge" episodes, where one host assigns themed prompts to the others, and they have to improvise.

As the drawing progresses, the hosts comment on their own and each others' work, discuss the topic itself, or just go on wild and completely unrelated tangents. The episodes usually only show the artists making the black and white sketches, with the fully colored versions being edited in at the end.

The founding fathers of the show are Nathan Yaffe and Caldwell Tanner of CollegeHumor, who were later joined by Jacob Andrews from For Lack Of A Better Comic, Julia LePetit from Dorkly, and Karina "Dilfosaur" Farek. Frequently recurring guests are Dorkly's Willie Muse, Jake Young, and Tristan "The Lore Librarian" Cooper. Jacob, Nathan, Julia, and Karina became the core team until 2026, when Karina's departure was announced.

On January 8th, 2020, IAC, the parent company of Drawfee, Dorkly, and CollegeHumor, laid off most of their personnel, which included all of the cast and crew of Drawfee. The channel's future remained uncertain, as IAC still technically owned the Drawfee brand. Thankfully, the team announced on July 2nd that they had gotten back the rights to Drawfee, and were coming back stronger than ever as fully independent content creators.

Drawfee Series:

There are several recurring series on the Drawfee Channel, some of the most prominent being:

• Drawfee Challenges: Also known as Morning Drawfee. Consists of various challenges based on viewer suggestions, including Artists Draw from Memory, Knock Off, Drawfee Roulette and ___ They've Never Seen. Generally focused on making Entertainingly Wrong Fan Art.
• Drawfee Beans: Similar to the Drawfee Challenges, but more frequently released, less elaborate and recorded live. In the transition period after the CollegeHumor shutdown, Beans stood for the majority of the channel's content. After the channel became independent Beans was officially retired, though the format is still used for the occasional one-off holiday episode.
• Drawga: A role-playing series created by Caldwell Tanner and Nathan Yaffe, where the plot is determined by a combination of Tabletop RPG mechanics and audience interaction. It also spawned a spinoff comic — Ladies Book Club — about the (somewhat misleadingly named) Adventure Guild and its' members, who serve as the protagonists from the second season onwards. Has its own page under construction here.
• Drawtectives: Another Urban Fantasy RPG series, created by Julia LePetit. The plot involves a team of rookie detective Ragtag Bunch of Misfits trying to solve a murder, using their investigative skills and... drawing abilities? Has its own page under construction here.
• Cartoon Hell: An Animated Adaptation starring (the Adam Westing) Nathan Yaffe and Caldwell Tanner as themselves in Hell, where they are forced to create pitches for local animated shows. Features an Expository Theme Tune by "Weird Al" Yankovic. As the series was produced for CollegeHumor's streaming platform Dropout, it's unknown whether it will continue without their involvement or if it's simply been cancelled.
• Drawfee Variety Hour: A live-action series featuring the Drawfee artists on an actual set, making art in mediums other than digital with many In-Universe SelfImposedChallenges. However, the CollegeHumor layoffs and the Covid-19 pandemic meant that using the studio space, much less filming with a full camera crew, is out of the question for the foreseeable future.
  • Brought back in 2025 for a charity stream as the Drawfee Va-Pride-ity Hour, no longer with a full studio, instead being streamed in Karina’s apartment with various special guests and art challenges. Replaced the yearly Trans Rigs stream to support Trans Lifeline while Jacob and Julia were on parental leave.
• Bad JRPG: The Legends of Krys: An Affectionate Parody of EasternRPGs. Nathan Yaffe and Jacob Andrews set out to pitch the worst Japanese role-playing game of all time. Originally a Morning Drawfee segment, later expanded into a full series. Has its own page under construction here.
• The Fear of Painting: Julia LePetit truly embraces her Fan Nickname as the Mother of Monsters in this Live-Action tutorial of how to create Cursed Paintings in a Affectionate Parody of Bob Ross. Possibly completed.

Associated with Drawfee, but not belonging to the Youtube channel proper are:

• Drawfee Streams: The gang draw upon suggestions from the chat on Twitch. It sometimes features guest artists.
• Secret Sleepover Society: Jacob and Julia play games for a Twitch audience. Sometimes features other Drawfee hosts.

The YouTube channel is available here.

The Twitch channel is available here.

The Secret Sleepover Society channel is available here

The stream VODs are now available in the Drawfee Extra YouTube channel.

This channel has examples of:

• AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle: The gang will sometimes goof by mispronouncing words. For example, Nathan likes to say "Ro-but" instead of "Robot" as a bit, and Julia bases some of her jokes or gags on mispronouncing or soundalike words, like interpreting the Pokémon Togademaru as the movie Edge of Tomorrow.
• April Fools' Day:
  • For April 1 2021, it was announced that Drawfee Show was rebranding itself as a gaming channel, complete with a name change to "Gamefee", a new logo and a redesigned header.
  Drawfee is a GAMING CHANNEL NOW??? (NOT CLICKBAIT)
  • Achieved a Call-Back in 2022, with Julia sitting down at the end of their apology video with a "Hey Gamers..."
• Artifact Title:
  • The original YouTube series started out as Nathan and Caldwell recording their warm-up sketches at the beginning of their workday at CollegeHumor, hence the title Morning Drawfee (a pun on "morning coffee") and why coffee mugs are used both as their logo and as a Couch Gag. Over the years, the "morning" was dropped, and the series developed into a full-fledged show, to the extent that the hosts now do warm-up sketches for Drawfee recordings.
  • The artifact was taken a step further in the 2020 Draw Something Dumb: The Drawfee Drawfalong Activity Book, wherein they consistently use "drawfing" as a verb meaning "to draw something dumb".
• Ascended Meme:
  • Julia's habit of drawing a room full of vampires (see Running Gag below) was eventually made into an episode of its own.
  • One of the beans episodes was Drawing Months As People. After about half of the comments on that video were people saying they'd misread the title as Drawing Moths As People, the hosts decided to make an episode about that. The commenters, of course, took the opportunity to misread the title once again, and so we got a third episode, Drawing Mouths As People.
• Badass Longcoat: Julia loves a high collared longcoat on a sad-looking beautiful man.
  Jacob: In Julia's art brain, it's always winter, and everyone's just gone through a breakup.
• Badass Normal: The Historical Figures as Anime Characters videos are all about real people who did amazing things but were generally left out of history books.
• Blatant Lies: Artists Draw Things That Are Not Creepy predictably features drawings that are mildly unsettling at best and nightmare inducing at worst.
• Body Horror: Julia's specialty. In the Bloodborne Boss Challenge, Jacob reveals that Julia's practice file for the episode was just fifteen layers of writhing flesh.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • The 30 Second Drawing Challenge and the MS Paint Drawing Challenge were followed by the 30 Second MS Paint Drawing Challenge.
  • In the 4 Artists, 1 Prompt episode, Jacob announces that they will be doing something different, and when the others suggest that they are either making music or cooking, Jacob resigns that they are cooking music.
  • In that videos sequel, Jacob announces the return of a recent success. Nathan and Karina press if it's the Bone Game or the NeoPets challenge. While Jacob tells them to be quiet, Karina quietly says "The NeoPets Bone Game". A fake thumbnail for the challenge slides on-screen.
  • The Original Character "Todd from Mario" was spawned in this manner. The audience suggested drawing a possum, but one member suggested Toad instead. Karina misreads Toad as Todd, and the prompts were combined to draw a possum in a Toad outfit named Todd.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Hunter Richardson, a character made for the Randomly Generated Couple Drawing Challenge, is said to enjoy watching TV, photography, and vandalism.
• Breaking Old Trends: After going independent, the cohosts would redesign their avatars to celebrate each anniversary milestone. After Karina's departure, the three remaining cohosts opted to ditch the trend and do redesigns during the new year (start of 2027). Julia's maternity leave, which kept her absent for a chunk of the 2025-2026 season, was another factor in the decision, as her avatar barely saw any official use.
• Buffy Speak: The hosts sometimes regress into this, mostly due to the improvisational nature of the show. Sometimes the hosts intentionally play it up, e.g. when Nathan refers to making educational content as "doing a learn". Julia also likes to play fast and loose with grammar, such as when instead of "What does his mouth look like?" she asks "How his mouth do?" And that's only the intentional ones — they are also known for such legendary verbal typos as "can you believe to learn" and "who do I know this man?"
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Almost on a Once per Episode basis, one of the hosts will slip up or say something random, and the others will immediately gang up and razz them for the rest of the episode. Such flubs can even go on to become a recurring joke, such as Julia's remark of "Can you believe to learn?" which now has a Patreon tier named after it.
  • In the Drawfee Variety Hour, their wheel of drawing challenges would always almost land on "Kill Nathan". In the last episode, it lands on it. Cut to Jacob, Karina and Julia beating something behind the couch. He got better.
• Canines Gambling in a Card Game: In Drawing Classic Paintings Based ONLY on Our Bad Description, Karina tasks Nathan to draw Dogs Playing Poker with only her description. Karina merely mentioning a circular table and a few nondescript figures was enough for Nathan to correctly guess that he was recreating this classic artwork.
• Captain Ersatz: The focus of Drawing Knockoff Characters episodes is creating a bunch of these for a specific property.
• Catchphrase: A few have developed over the years.
  • "Look at this friend!" (Nathan)
  • "I'm not a gamer / I don't consume media" (Karina)
  • "There it is!" (Julia, after making an Pun)
  • "It's true." (Caldwell, always in exactly the same way)
  • "Delete your art!" (Shared catchphrase, when someone removes a significant chunk of what's being drawn)
• Christmas Episode: A yearly tradition (well, technically it's Porfmas), along with Halloween Episodes and Thanksgiving Episodes. They have also produced at least one Valentine's Day Episode.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • In Aesthetic Generator Drawing Challenge, Jacob attemtps to posit a hypothetical scenario where a person who's never seen a crab apart from a single, protoypical example would not then consider a horseshoe crab to be a type of crab. This devolves into a bit where the rest of the crew question Jacob on, among other things, how fundamentally different the show Spongebob Squarepants would be if Mr. Krabs didn't exist.
  • Tends to happen at the start of every Nuesday episode, just to mess with Jacob.
• Completely Off-Topic Report: Sometimes Julia's work for speed draws (episodes in which the artists work on their own time and "turn in" their timelapse process and result to the group) demonstrate a tenuous relation to the prompt, causing the team to lose their shit with glee watching the presentation unfold fully counter to all expectation. Examples include:
  • A prompt to digitally illustrate how The Super Mario Bros. Movie would look done by a different studio results in Julia doing a piece based on Luigi's Mansion...which is sculpted and photographed like a still from an Aardman Animations film.
  • When making "scary Bedsheet Ghost" artwork for Halloween, Julia's piece consists of a lovingly-rendered atmospheric drawing of a model house miniature on a table, sans all supernatural elements until the final 5% of the process, where ghost imagery is added very subtly.
  • When prompted to make a drawing adapting the physical description of a distinctive monster, which all of the artists are using, Julia's interpretation consists of over three scrapped takes where most of the written description is disregarded and the subject is a moody portrait of a man haunted by the monster, which is a metaphor for his turmoil.
• Conversational Troping: The foundation of the Legend of Krys aka The Worst JRPG mini-series, where the hosts deliberately invoke, exaggerate and twist all the most common tropes of JRPG's in general (and Final Fantasy in particular).
• Couch Gag: Most episodes used to start with a brief spiel where the hosts introduce themselves and the show, during which plays a speed drawing of a blank white coffee mug being redesigned along the topic of the day. This was later retired due to the hosts deciding that it added little to a given episode for how much effort it took. Now, most episodes begin with the hosts introducing themselves as their self protraits pop up and briefly (or not-so-briefly) discussing the premise of the episode.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The thumbnail for Drawing Books Based Only on the First and Last Line had covers for three books. Out of those three books, the one not used for a drawing was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, though it was discussed for a chunk of the video. The book not shown in the thumbnail that was used for a drawing was, instead, This Side of Paradise.
  • The thumbnail for The Worst Superheroes has one silhouette for each participating artist: Ralph, Karina, and Nathan. Two silhouettes actually belong to the heroes' designated archnemeses instead, since the actual heroes take on atypical body shapes.
• Crowd Chant: Bit of an exaggeration, considering there's usually three or four people in the room at any given recording, but sometimes the hosts will invoke the trope.
  • In Artists Draw Lovecraftian Horrors, Julia adds a second mouth to her rendition of an Elder Thing fairly late. Caldwell turns to an imaginary stadium crowd and says "What do the fans want? They want one! More! Mouth!"
  • In Artists Draw Zelda Bosses, after Karina adds a disturbing row of pointy teeth to her Demon Train, Tristan and Jacob break into an improvised chant of "Hey! Hey! Don't do that! Hey! Hey! Stop right now!"
  • In Artists Draw Horses Based on Their Crazy Names, everyone begins to chant "Is the burger, like the burger" in support of Burgoo King.
• Cuteness Overload:
  • Nathan makes very characteristic noises when he sees something cute. This eventually led to a viewer requesting that they just draw "something that makes Nathan go Aww". Caldwell decided to exaggerate it and create The Nicest Drawing, in an attempt to kill Nathan with cuteness.
  • Indirectly in the Drawing Dungeons & Dragons Cats episode. Jacob and Julia draw their own cats as D&D characters; during the process, they continuously tell stories about the cats' habits and personalities, while Karina and Nathan audibly melt in the background.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Happens to Jacob during the single layer challenge. The artists could not erase or undo, yet he accidentally uses the undo function as a force of habit for his piece.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Parodied in the Drawing Edgy Original Characters (Do Not Steal) and Arts Against Humanity episodes, among others. The latter in particular consists of almost nothing but the hosts making fun of teenage edgelords.
  • Drawing Disney characters as Dark Souls bosses, obviously.
  • Artists turn Cute Drawings into Nightmares also counts.
• Deathbringer the Adorable: In the third instalment of the Style Mash-Up Challenge, Jacob is tasked to draw Eileen the Crow (from Bloodborne) as a character in Over the Garden Wall. By the end of the episode, the hosts refer to the game as Bwoodbowne.
• Death Is Cheap: Nathan has at least died three times: once in the last episode of Drawfee Variety Hour, again in the video announcing their layoff from CollegeHumor, and again when the channel announces the Extreme Jacob Horse plush to celebrate their fifth year as a standalone channel. Fortunately, they had another one ready to go each time.
• Deconstruction: The hosts often like to draw the "unseen" side of common things in pop culture, which usually turns out pretty prosaic (or, in the case of Thomas & Friends, straight up horrifying).
• Deliberately Monochrome: The Drawing Shades of episodes, in which the artists draw using only variants of one color. So far, they have made episodes based around blue, green, purple and red.
• Denser and Wackier: Generally speaking, their challenge creations tend to be this compared to their canon counterparts, when such things exist.
• Disappointed in You: In the Star Wars Challenge:
  Jacob: I'm not mad at you, Nathan. I'm just disappointed. And I'm also very mad.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The topics for most of the early episodes were "adjective nouns", e.g. Athletic Sloths, Sassy Palm Trees, Political Unicorns, etc. (a format later reserved for their easier-to-produce Beans episodes.) As the show began to bring on guest artists, so too did they start doing a number of the drawing challenges the channel is best known for.
• Eldritch Abomination: Porfo is only a boy-band member while he waits for the day when he will consume all our souls and burn the universe to ash. He has become central figure of an In-Universe movement which, if not a full-blown Religion of Evil, at least runs on Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Emotion Eater: Slick Pete from Drawing The Most Relatable Comic eats Anxious Anders' anxiety, but gets anxious himself when Anders watches him eat it.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Part of the fun in many of their challenges is seeing the hosts draw subjects they're unfamiliar with and see just how inaccurately they can interpret them. Julia, who herself repeatedly claims to be incapable of retaining information, is especially prone to this, such as her now infamous Spheal interpretation.
• Escalating Punchline:
  • The hosts will sometimes launch into this as they try to one-up each other after a joke.
  • An intentional example occurs in the Digimon Evolution Drawing Challenge, when Karina compares evolution patterns in Pokémon and Digimon.
  Karina: In Pokémon, it goes Charmander, Charmeleon, Charizard. You get that. In Digimon, it's Charmander, Charizard, Charizard with a gun wearing pants, Gyarados, Professor Oak in BDSM gear... and then Ditto.
• Evolving Credits: The artists have redone their portraits once every year to update how they feel and what kind of drawing style they're currently in. Jacob also drew his 2021 portrait with blond highlights, which were then phased out as his own real-life hair grew out.
• Expendable Clone: Nathan is actually a series of these, allowing him to die several times throughout the show. At one point, he was even tricked into consuming one of his previous selves to gain the strength of two Nathans.
• Extreme Omnivore:
  • During Karina's Running Gag involving a post-shower Sonic the Hedgehog, it's implied that the lack of towels came from Tails eating them.
  • It's a Porfmas tradition to give your friends a gift that they are obligated to eat in a single sitting, no matter what it is.
• Fan Art: Subverted. They often make an effort to draw characters from works they are not fans of — or at least unfamiliar with — specifically to invoke an In-Universe case of Critical Research Failure.
• Fantastic Racism: Parodied in the Evangelion Challenge. When Julia describes the angel Ramiel to Nathan, she says it screams a lot; Nathan therefore draws it with a huge mouth. Julia later reveals that Ramiel does not have a mouth; Nathan ruefully admits his design was based on a "very mouth-normative" assumption.
• Flanderization: Nathan is the only member of the regular Drawfee crew with a full beard, and though it's gotten bushier over the years it's still not particularly long. Drawings of him, especially in the Drawfee Animated segments and Nuesday intros, depict him with a gigantic, bushy beard that's almost half his size.
• From Bad to Worse: On her turn in the Style Mash Up Challenge, Julia has to draw Waluigi in the style of Junji Ito.
• Gag Censor: During We Turned These Public Domain Characters into Horror Movies, Karina deploys a fish to censor Donald Duck's groin, as she is accounting for a potential Animals Lack Attributes aversion.
• Hate Sink: The Everyone's Worst Friend episode where they create everyone's worst friend Jed. He starts looking suspiciously like Peter Griffin but they quickly change some details so he's legally distinct. GOD WE HATE YOU, JED!
• Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Willie repeatedly refers to himself as "famed heterosexual Willie Muse", who "slays pussy on the fucking daily". He also talks about his "platonic friend Matt", with whom he routinely shares a bed, and who happens to be gay. But not Willie. Nope. Nuh uh.
• Hilarious Outtakes: "4 Artists Draw Fan Art of EACH OTHER'S Art" starts with intro bloopers, complete with corpsing and derails.
• History Repeats: For Artists Draw Themselves in an Anime, Julia's speed draw features a Blender segment, with Karina drawing attention to it. Fast forward a few years and Nathan draws attention to Jacob using Blender for Drawing Sincere Fan Art of Our Favorite Spooky Media.
  Karina: Julia...is this Blender?
  Nathan: Jacob...is this Blender?
• Ice-Cream Koan: All the quotes used in the episode Drawing Randomly Generated Inspirational Posters count, due to the fact that they are AI-generated.
• Inherently Funny Word: The Medieval Words episode turns "merobiba"^*Latin word defining a woman who drinks strong wine into one after associating it with a deformed version of Merida and using an Elmuh Fudd Syndwome-style accent to amp up the humor.
• Insistent Terminology: It's not just a dagger, it's an italian cold steel cinquedea.
• It Will Never Catch On: In Drawtectives episode 6 (the first episode published after Drawfee became a fully independent enterprise), the three main characters wonder aloud if they should pursue art professionally, to which a nearby NPC responds, "No one has ever made a career out of art".
• Lighter and Softer: The hosts lighten up spooky empty liminal spaces in The Backrooms are Too Scary so We Fixed Them with Art by filling them up with something lighter in tone.
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context:
  • Sometimes their drawings simply turn out strange because the source material was bonkers to begin with. The stock image episodes are a good example of the artists actually managing to replicate the original pictures quite well.
  • The commentary for each drawing tends to go off the rails just as quickly, and is a signature part of the channel's appeal.
• Metaphorgotten: In More Randomly Generated Drawing Challenges, Nathan and Jacob have a brief confrontation about how to draw trains properly, which is quickly derailed by their unshakable joviality.
  Nathan: I've seen you draw cars' wheels as little nubbins, so get off my fucking case.
  Jacob: You get... on... my page. My webpage. My Nathan fan page that I've made.
  Nathan: Aww, you made a fan page for me?
• Mix-and-Match Critters: One Bone Game episode is dubbed ''Bone Game Frankenstein". In addition to skulls, torsos and legs are added, and they're put together to make new animals.
• Negative Continuity: While some of their more story-based shows have "proper" continuity, anything established in their regular series is subjected to Continuity Snarl. The supposed relations between the artists is especially prone to changing at random based on what's funny at the moment.
• Nightmare Fetishist: On the episode of The Fear of Painting where he appears as the guest artist, ProZD makes it clear that he understands what the show is about, but is irritated that this one episode is absolutely normal. He quickly becomes angry that Julia is not even trying to harvest his soul.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: In the Artists Redraw Childhood Art episode, resident Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant Julia digs up a drawing from when she was three years old, seemingly of herself crying. The other hosts point out that it looks like an image you'd find in a horror game to indicate that a child was possessed.
• Noodle Incident: In a lost version of the Random Shapes challenges, Julia turned one such random shape into a room full of vampires, which we only get to hear about on the replacement episode and several subsequent Random Shapes challenges. Fortunately, we get to hear a little more of the story thanks to some salvaged audio.
• Odd Name Out: The fictional Boy Band The Fave Boys, consisting of Dave, Trave, Zave, and... Porfo.
• Once per Episode: Every Drawfee art stream starts with a mug drawing and ends with a Porfo cameo in the final picture drawn.
• Only Sane Woman: Rosé in Drawtectives; the other members of the team are a half-orc ignorant of civilization and an absent-minded dwarf druid; she's just a normal human trying to earn a paycheck.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In the Knock-Off Zelda Characters episode, Nathan is tasked to draw "the character who's definitely not Princess Zelda", which ends up being a gormless Zelda look-alike with a glued-on handlebar moustache, and a pair of blue jeans painted on her skirt.
• Playing Against Type: In Draw Things that are not Creepy, Julia is the only one of the crew to draw something that doesn't have some sort of creepy element to it; moreover, her image is based on themes from the previous drawings, with a completely wholesome result.
• Polar Bears and Penguins: For the first episode in which the hosts recreate childhood art, Nathan redid a drawing that has penguins alongside arctic wolves and walruses. Justified, as children aren't expected to know which polar animal goes on which side of the globe.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: During the Drawing Dungeons & Dragons Cats, the conversation turns to Columbo and Karina looks up a picture of Peter Falk only to explain "I don't know who this man is, I don't consume media!"
• Pun:
  • Nathan's weapon of choice, but the other hosts can hold their own just fine as well.
    Nathan: It's not a Drawfee episode unless people are disappointed in me.
  • All of the hosts appreciate a good pun, but perhaps the most prominent run of puns was the Drawing New Postage Stamps episode, which involved a Lady and the Tramp stamp, a ramp stamp, a vamp stamp (drawn by Julia, of course), and closed the loop with a Scamp stamp.
• Revolving Door Casting: The cast varies from episode to episode, and over the years new artists have come (like Karina) and gone, or at least started Commuting on a Bus (like Caldwell.) Eventually, due to CollegeHumor folding, the cast settled on Nathan, Jacob, Karina and Julia. The common format involves either Nathan or Jacob hosting/calling the prompts, while the other three cast members draw.
• Running Gag:
  • Julia's distaste for Vegeta, and the other hosts nagging her into drawing him.
  • Julia's interpretation of Spheal during the first Pokémon From Memory challenge was so bizarre that it became a sort of unofficial mascot for the channel. A corollary to this is Julia knowing nothing about Pokémon in general.
    • Julia's off-model Hilda from "30 Second MS Paint Drawing Challenge" is almost as infamous at this point, and whenever it's mentioned a ghostly image of it will appear for a few moments.
  • Tuesday videos regularly feature the cast trying a new challenge introduced by Jacob. Starting with the first Non-Artist Fan Art Challenge, Jacob originally called it "Trysday", and eventually renamed it "Nuesday" at Nathan's suggestion. Since then, his spiel where he introduces the challenge has grown longer and more elaborate with each episode.
  • In the My Hero Academia/Rob Liefeld episode of The Style Mash-up Challenge, Julia kicks off by mispronouncing the name Liefeld despite her and Jacob having watched video interviews with him just prior. The hosts then proceed to take a leaf out of Yahtzee Croshaw's book and come up with increasingly mangled mispronunciations as the episode goes on, such as LeFeld, Loolie Foolie, Lupin III, LucasArts and Leonidas.
  • Jacob shows great interest in determining which characters do or do not fuck.
  • Nathan hates tomatoes, while Jacob loves yogurt.
  • Nathan keeps having to draw rude apes.
  • Karina, and her imaginary love escapades with Seto Kaiba.
  • When Julia is given a long prompt, she tends to forget parts of it by focusing on the wrong thing.
  • Julia drawing horror versions of Kermit the Frog, and throwing in her minimalistic version of Batman for good measure.
  • Julia's inability to accurately remember how Sonic looks like. She seems to think that he's shaped like "a ball or an egg shape", and that he doesn't have a separate torso.
  • Julia's ongoing struggle to draw an egg properly, as she instead often draws them unusually pointy at the top.
  • In the lost version of Artists Make More Characters From Random Shapes, Julia somehow creates a scene depicting a room full of vampires from her random shape. Every iteration of the Random Shapes challenge thereafter had her mock up a room full of vampires using her shape, usually in addition to her actual character. Drawing A Room Full of Vampires would later become its own Beans episode.
  • In general, Julia has a habit of putting an incredible amount of energy into her backgrounds, especially during character challenges.
  • In the Drawfee Variety Hour episodes, whenever they spin the wheel to determine the next activity, it always pauses on "Kill Nathan" before landing on something else. In the last episode, it finally does land on "Kill Nathan", and they beat him to death with baseball bats. It lands on the same again later in the episode, but they've already done it, so they just spin again.
  • Julia's habit of drawing Pokémon in suits is called out multiple times. She's drawn Spheal in a suit twice (once when just given the name, once when given a mangled Pokédex entry), Exeggeon (a fusion of Exeggutor and Vaporeon), and Virizion.
  • Following the premiere of "Despair", Destiel (i.e. Dean/Castiel) becomes a recurring conversation topic for the Drawfee crew during their Twitch streams, mostly because Karina was part of the Supernatural fandom back in its peak around 2013-2014. This bled into the show itself with Karina choosing to draw Misha Collins for the Drawing Celebrities (One Facial Feature at a Time) challenge and her Grinch/Onceler Spanish confession scene redraw making a cameo in the Artists Draw Hearthstone Cards (That They've Never Seen) episode.
  • Interrupting Jacob when he tries to introduce the episode, which can become an Overly Long Gag.
    • Declaring "we all have ‘em," "who needs 'em," and "they're just like us" (usually in that order) when someone brings up the topic of the episode.
    • Karina asking if the topic of the episode is The Bone Game.
  • Similar to Julia's former obsession with turning every drawing into a room full of vampires, Karina has developed a tendency to take any shape-based prompt as a challenge to somehow turn it into Sonic — specifically, a scene where Sonic is lying in bed and reading the newspaper after showering, and is interrupted by the viewer.
  • For a time, the crew would end up talking about Cats (2019) in nearly every episode. Eventually, they even released a Cats 2019 Drawing Challenge episode.
  • The two spam e-mail videos contain a gag in which the Devil makes someone consume a dish shaped like a rear end and Jesus giving a forceful intervention.
  • When knives are involved in a drawing, the artists tend to gravitate towards the Italian cold steel cinquedea over other knives.
• Self-Deprecating Humor: Perhaps the only thing the hosts like more than making fun of pop culture is making fun of themselves.
  Julia: [talking about Silent Hill] Sometimes it's about the occult, and sometimes it's about the fact that you are a garbage person.
  Jacob: Uh, I play video games to get away from reality...
• Sequel Episode: Some of the more popular episodes have been given these. Examples include “[Artists Draw] More Historical Figures as Anime Characters,” “More Yule Lads,” “More Randomly Generated Drawing Challenges”, and basically any other episode with the word "more" in the title.
• Sequential Artist: Most of the cast have a background as cartoonists, though Karina and Julia tend to lean more on the artsy side (Julia in particular).
• Serious Business: Julia, Karina, and Tristan lose their minds at Jacob in Artists Draw Zelda Bosses (That They've Never Seen) when he looks up what an oboe looks like for reference.
• Sign Off Catchphrase: Every video ends with the hosts saying "We're sorry." The times they haven't felt particularly sorry could be counted on one hand.
• Special Guest: The hosts will sometimes bring one-time guests such as ProZD, Carey Pietsch of The Adventure Zone, Brian David Gilbert of Unraveled, or Katy Coope (author of How to Draw Manga).
• Spin-Off: Karina's "Hot Guy P.I" comic miniseries stars Schmidt and Nando from the "Drawing the Most Handsome Man" episode.
• Squiggle Vision: The Nuesday introductions and Drawfee Animated videos are done in this style.
• Starfish Aliens: The extraterrestrial life designed for Hank Green Describes Planets and We Drew Aliens That Would Live There have otherworldly biology. Nathan and Julia designed aquatic beings, while Karina designed a land animal.
• Stealing from the Till: The layoff announcement video ends with the Drawfee crew stealing chairs and small pieces of equipment from the office as they left.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Occasionally, one of the hosts will set up an obscure/obtuse joke for themselves, and another one will spike it out of the blue.
  • In the Bloodborne Boss Challenge episode:
  Jacob: [describing a boss called Mergo's Wet Nurse] She doesn't even get a name of her own. She's only known as "Mergo's Wet Nurse". She really gets lost in her job and her career. It's the start of a romantic comedy. [movie trailer voice] This high powered businesswoman has no time for love until she meets —
  Jacob and Justin in unison: —Matthew McConaughey!
  Julia: ...wow.
  • In the Lord of the Rings Character Challenge episode:
  Tristan: [describing Feanor, an unpopular elven character] Fourthly, he poo'd all over the bond he'd made with his brother Fingolfin in front of Manwe when they both swore fealty to each other.
  Nathan: What's a Manwe?
  Tristan: Oh, you know, about 160-180 pounds.
  Nathan: [unbridled glee] There it is! Yaaaaaay!
  • In Pokémon Type Swap Challenge Julia, upon hearing the name of the Pokémon Togedemaru, mumbles half a joke that she "really liked that movie, but [she] found the sci-fi a little confusing," and when the others are confused, makes a "tuh" sound, then stops entirely. Somehow, Jacob was able to immediately guess that she was making an oblique Edge of Tomorrow reference.
• Stylistic Suck: While the co-hosts are shown to be really talented at art, they could also make derpy-looking pieces by choice or if the prompt demands it. For example, one popular depiction of a horse from Jacob consists of a sausage-shaped creature with horse features.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: More often than not, the person who’s drawing will end up drawing something that doesn’t make any sense in any way possible, while the others try to come up with reasons the drawing is the way that it is. The person drawing will usually go, ”Oh, yeah, sure.”
• Take a Third Option: In the 2024 Portrait Redraw episode, Julia first draws an sardine in a tin for her "self-portrait", then switches to a more traditional portrait. All this time she and the others joke about how she might just use the sardine one anyways, or maybe combine the two. At the end she declares she'll figure out which one she goes with after the render, at which point a new, fully-rendered portrait pops up from the bottom of Julia dressed as a sardine. That's the one she uses up until the next redraw.
• Take That!:
  • Sometimes the hosts will dish out some absolutely scathing hot takes, such as "an oboe is like a clarinet for idiots". Willie in particular is known for his acerbic comments; so much so that in the Knock-Offee Revenge episode, Nathan draws him as a chili pepper.
  • We get one in the form of an editing gag in "Drawing Pokémon Type Combos that were NEVER USED IN GAME":
    Jacob: These are the [type combinations] that were too boring: Normal/Rock,
    Nathan: 'Hey, what music are you listening to?' 'Normal rock.' (A graphic of Billy Joel's greatest hits slides onscreen)
  • In one episode based on using Emojis, Karina takes a Creepy Monotone jab at A.I.-Generated Artwork after a joke about stealing art to express emotions.
    Karina: Steal them and it's called (shifts to monotone) AI Art.
• Tempting Fate: In the "Artists Draw Personalized Tarot Cards" episode, Jacob spends quite some time saying he won't get The Fool, that it's very unlikely he'll get The Fool, that if he gets The Fool he's leaving, and yet right at 20:41 when it's Jacob's turn to draw...
  Julia: I really wish that that was a bit. I can't like... explain to the audience enough just how that it, like... just happended.
  Jacob, in complete disbelief and defeat: It was so unlikely...
• Three Shorts: A variation. Each episode generally featured three artists, each doing their own drawing. It briefly grew to four when Karina joined. In 2022, in an attempt to reduce overwork among the team, they've started to return to fewer hosts drawing even when all four are in the episode. These days, the general formula is one host giving prompts to the other three, and some episodes one or two of them to specifically highlight them. On the occasion that all four are drawing in the same episode, it's either a speed draw (done in advance so they have more time to work on them) or intentionally rough work that they're not expected to clean up at any point.
• Tomato in the Mirror: In the Knock-Offee episode, Jacob creates a knock-off version of Nathan, drawing him as the thing he hates the most: a tomato. Jacob quickly names him "Tomathan".
• Tyop on the Cover: In Professional Artists Redraw Their Childhood Art, Karina redraws a childhood comic containing many typos, notably the title "Ghost Tret" (threat). Karina maintains all the comic's text verbatim in her redraw, typos included.
• Understatement: The video announcing the team's layoffs begins with a camera pointed at a computer displaying a news article about said layoffs, which then pans over to Nathan, who casually says, "Uh-oh."
• Unfortunate Names: Discussed by Brennan in the D&D Villains video. First-time D&D players will often come up with ludicrous names like "Buttscratch Tumbledown", not realizing that those names are going to be used in dead serious situations later on.
  Character's lover, dying in his arms: I... I have always... loved you... Buttscratch.
• Unsound Effect: In The Sexiest Drawing, the sound effect made by a centaur slapping its own bottom is "RUMP!"
• Vague Age: It is intentionally unclear as to whether the recurring character Old Baby Gus is a newborn, very old, or somehow both at the same time.
• The Voice: Most episodes only ever show the Photoshop canvas the hosts are drawing on; however, this trope has been Averted in Drawga and the Drawfee Variety Hour (which was shot on a proper studio set) as well as some other special episodes and live recordings, proving once and for all that there are actual human beings behind the microphones.
• Waxing Lyrical: One Running Gag has Jacob start a statement with "Every time", with another cast member responding with "And every time we kiss, I swear I could fly".
• Weird Aside: Another frequent consequence of the show's improv nature, such as in the Drawloween 2018 episode:
  Caldwell: What kind of candy's everyone giving out this year?
  Nathan: I'm doing fun-sized Milky Ways.
  Julia: I'm gonna do hard to swallow life advice. "Listen, you're gonna go to college, and then you're gonna do a liberal arts degree, and then when you graduate you're gonna realize it didn't really matter, so congrats with that debt."
  Caldwell: I'm gonna do circus peanuts.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Willie and Julia's icons depict them as wearing a dress and a suit, respectively. Jacob also occasionally wears dresses in his daily life.
• Word-Salad Humor: The descriptions of the stock photos in the Stock Photo Challenges usually come to this.
  Jacob: Close-up red boxing gloves of competitors punching Asian businessman in his face in modern city background. Businessman is defeated in the competition game. Business and competition concept.
  Julia: The catsnake is next to the grim reaper with a sign around his neck—"zombie party!"—white background."
• You Mean "Xmas": The Drawfee crew invents a holiday called Porfmas, a Christmas-like holiday in which one must gift something and the receiver must eat it in front of them. Failure to do so would result in Porfo eating the soul of the one receiving the gift. If you like the gift recipient, you gift them a reasonable amount of something edible. If you don't like the person, you can gift them gross or even inedible things to force. So for example gifting someone a PS5 for Porfmas would be a horribly torturous ordeal, as they must either eat it all or lose their soul to Porfo.
• YouTuber Apology Parody: For April Fools' Day 2022, the cast makes an apology video concerning a deleted episode that features Nathan farting in the mic after a fall and Producer David bass-boosting it instead of removing it, a screaming contest with no clear winner, jumpscares, and recording mistakes. Karina, meanwhile, goes off-topic to apologize for a Snowball Fight incident in college, while Julia was at first unaware of what went on.

...We're sorry.