About

Irasutoya Challenge (Japanese: いらすとやチャレンジ) is a hashtag-based art challenge on X/Twitter in which online artists post illustrations reinterpreting Irasutoya's plain and simple works in their drawing styles. In October 2024, many amateur and professional illustrators/mangakas joined this hashtag online.

Origin

According to a post on the Japanese social curation service Togetter published on October 19th, 2024^[1], Japanese professional illustrator and animator Hamafugu (はまふぐ) started this art trend on October 15th with an illustration^[2] in which he interpreted Irasutoya's "Gal Peace" drawing,^[3] a kind of V-sign/peace sign pose that popular among young South Korean and Japanese women in 2022. This post earned over 17,000 reposts and 230,000 likes in its first week.

The other Togetter post explains it also contributed to the original post's spread that the girl seemed to be wearing a men's blazer, which gave rise to another interpretation that the blazer might be her boyfriend's.^[4] Expressing gratitude to a popular post pointing it out^[5], the author later admitted it was a simple mistake^[6] and responded with another illustration a few days later, in which she tried borrowing that blazer from "someone."^[7]

Spread

Following Hamafugu's idea, other online artists began posting their "Gal Peace" art with the hashtag "Irasutoya Challenge" (#いらすとやチャレンジ)^[8] (shown below). Along with the hashtag spread, its concept expanded as people redrew other Irassuya works. As a result, many illustrations reinterpreting Irasutoya's works flooded the internet, enough to receive the Pixiv Encyclopedia article^[9] and media reports from online news media late that month.^[10][11]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References