BRAD O'FARRELL: Fan art is often the viewer's reaction to the show projected onto the character.

FRED SEIBERT: It is something that happens in our culture that when we recognize something we immediately want to participate.

JONAH BLOCK: A lot of people like to make fan art, and they'll brush everything from "Doctor Who" to video games-- everything that kind of falls into geek culture.

ADAM JURESKO: People have this outlet, and they want to express their ideas.

They don't have to go the traditional routes that you had to go years ago to do this kind of work.

They are taking their style and something that is widely accessible and simply mixing the two things together so that what they do can be appreciated by more people.

BRAD O'FARRELL: The significance of fan art and fan fiction is that it's the first entry point in being creative for younger people.

There's a lot that goes into character design and creating characters, and if you just want to learn to draw, sometimes it's nice to not have to come up with a character and story and everything.

Fan art and fan fiction is like when you have characters that are from a story or a movie, and you want them to be doing things that they don't do.

It's like wish fulfillment, but for the characters.

Usually it's like really strong relationships that aren't romantic are always turned romantic under the lens of fan art and fan fiction.

And I've noticed also it will get really weird for shows that are really normal.

The "Sherlock" fandom is in this weird bubble where they-- their-- I can't tell if they're joking or not, but they're, like, in an arms race to be more absurd.

Like, I saw a fan art/fan fiction where Sherlock was a llama and John was a corgi, and they kiss but they're having trouble because their height difference.

How is that what this show is about in your head?

The fan fiction that I write is sort of absurdist.

I like writing crossover fan fiction because you could see the story happening, but just the two things are so completely unrelated.

My favorite one was "Beverly Drive Chihuahua," which is the story of "Drive" combined with "Beverly Hills Chihuahua."

So they're both set in LA, they both involve, like, heists, and they both have, like, love stories.

So I just made Ryan Gosling fall in love with the chihuahua.

Yeah.

I-- I-- I guess just the stupider the crossover is, the more I think it's funny.

I mean, a lot of people who are into fan art and fan fiction are very talented, but I think one of the appealing parts of it is that it gives you motivation to perfect your craft of either writing or drawing if there's an audience for it.

Pretty much everyone I know right now who's an artist started out drawing fan art.

ADAM JURESKO: How I came into graphic design was through being in bands and always having to make flyers for shows.

After a show was over, you, like, you had this piece of ephemera that you wanted to hold on to, and I thought that was a really powerful thing.

Film is such a personal thing to me, and I just wanted to make something that I could wholeheartedly stand behind.

The process varies from poster to poster, but the actual construction is there's an image that I want to work with, and then I take that, and I just have to build upon that.

And every poster is always different than the last one in terms of what I envisioned to what comes across.

Well the "Black Swan" poster was one of the first ones I made, and I wanted to keep it as simple and as minimal as possible, but also I wanted to apply that grainy aspect to it because it is such, like, a stark, terrifying film.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was a hard one because it's such a love film, and there's so much going on and there's so much depth to it.

That poster was a really complex poster to make, and I feel like that in itself pays homage to the film.

When I started doing this, I had no idea that was such a huge community of people that were so enthralled with fan art.

And there's such a sense of community around it and not competition, and that was really important to me.

I really want to make something that's more personal to the person who loves the movie, and I want to have them have such a positive reaction with it and not view it as just a movie poster.

JONAH BLOCK: I have to create fan art.

If I don't, I go crazy.

I got my graphic design start on Threadless because they gave me a platform to show off what I was doing and have it made into something.

A friend of mine, he had a fan-run contest within the site called Threadless loves minimalism.

So we all just forced ourselves to do minimalism designs.

The superhero ones start with Spider-Man, and it was so successful, I decided to do a series.

The rules for the superhero ones are every character has to be broken down into two colors so that one color could be the man's shape, and one color is the pun that represents their power.

If it's Luke Cage, I draw a cage.

Aquaman, I drew a cup of water, and people really react to it.

I still don't quite understand it, but if I post it on Tumblr today, it's going to get reblogged 1,000 times.

I collaborate with a lot of other artists too, because I have more ideas than I can draw.

My most successful thing this way was "Star Wars" with unicorns.

It was a unicorn that looked like Darth Vader and a unicorn missing a hoof that looked like Luke Skywalker with light saber horns.

And it has to be stuff people can relate to.

Unicorns are one of the subcategories that people react to online.

You got astronauts, zombies, then there's a huge audience that really wants the stuff.

They don't just want to look at it.

They want to buy it on T-shirts and show it off at conventions.

Humans have a need to share information and ideas.

Anything we like, anything that's important to us, we have to let other people know about it.

It's not enough to just make things.

Once you make it, you want to show it off.

SAM SPRATT: On some level, I am just a fan boy, and I love certain TV shows, and I want to pay homage to them.

There's an early episode of "The Office," and it ends with Jim as Dwight saying, "bears, beets, 'Battlestar Galactica.'"

I just loved that alliteration, and I thought it would be cool to do a portrait of that.

So I made Dwight wearing a bear.

I gave him a little beet juice stain on his collar and gave him a little "Battlestar Galactica" pin.

And so it's all really subtle stuff.

It's just a moment that fans will appreciate.

And those are the people that will share it most.

And, you know, there will be people that rip it apart, and I love that, because if you take enough of it in, it helps refine the next piece and the next piece.

And I really enjoy that aspect of it.

I had recently joined Tumblr, and I started seeing these rage comics pop up.

And I thought it would just be fantastic to, you know, just apply what I do with my realistic portraits to these faces that are supposed to be human, but kind of make them a little messed up.

I made one for fun, and, you know, some random person stuck it on Reddit, and it went wild.

I got all these requests for-- do "LOL Face."

Do "Why You No."

So I did eight that sort of encompassed a wide range of the most popular ones.

Then I packaged them all together as the Illustrated Internet series cause I just wanted people to share them freely.

And it's for the internet.

It's for people to share.

When it comes to these internet memes, so many people from any fandom can appreciate what they are.

Thus, they will naturally reach a larger audience.

You know, people write the internet off as if it's a detriment to creativity.

To me, I can scroll 30 seconds on Tumblr, and I can see more images than any other means of digesting content.

And it just inspires you immensely to keep going.

FRED SEIBERT: Seven years ago, Pen Ward pitched us "Adventure Time."

We made the short, and when it came out, it had that really simple art style that Pen has.

But when you were done with the cartoon, all you wanted to do was look at it again.

Before we knew it, one of the fans had ripped a copy and started putting it up on YouTube, and it started gathering millions of views.

We were developing the show for a television series, and Pen started coming into the development meetings with all of this art that clearly he hadn't done.

And he goes, oh, there's hundreds of pieces of fan art on DeviantArt.

I went, wait a minute.

We have one six-minute film on YouTube, and the cartoon was made for kids, and that has generated hundreds of pieces of fan art.

To this day, it doesn't compute.

The fan art didn't stop.

And in fact, it wasn't just somebody drawing.

We have seen people who have done cosplay and dressed up.

We have seen 3D art, LEGOs, clay, cakes baked as the characters.

But the most exciting part is the interaction of the artists who are on the show with the fans who are drawing.

One of our character designers, a woman named Natasha Allegri, started doing her own fan art of "Adventure Time," making little comics of characters that she had remixed out of the show.

And instead of Finn and Jake, she had created Fionna and Cake.

And all of a sudden, we had a whole community bubbling up, not of the show, but of Natasha's remix of the show in her comics on her Tumblr.

We decided to produce a special episode of Fionna and Cake.

Turned out to be our highest rated episode so far in the history of "Adventure Time."

In this age of the internet, I think that we have this possibility for real time collaboration that, in our case, has ended up being creative collaboration at a level that I never suspected was possible.

BRAD O'FARRELL: If you're just drawing and not showing it to anyone, then your drawings aren't going to get any better.

But if you put it on the internet and there's people automatically caring, then you will get better as an artist.

SAM SPRATT: For them, it's a means of expression of how much they care about these things.

ADAM JURESKO: One of the best things about it is that there's such a sense of community around it.

JONAH BLOCK: If you make a stylized thing about something people like, they're gonna want to share it.

FRED SEIBERT: There is this mind meld between performers, artists, and their fans that, in the 20th century and beyond, has been almost completely unique.

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