If you need encouragement on a bad day, pay attention to the tear-off ads stuck to the walls around you."Sad? Take a smiling baby elephant with you!" reads an ad on Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street.Instead of a phone number, the ad’s tear-off parts have sketches of cute cartoonish elephants – all hand-drawn.
The ad is one of the many created by artist Anastasia Vinokurova. Every morning of the past month Vinokurova, 27, has been putting up one ad in central Kyiv.
With slogans like “Having a bad day? Take a beaver with you!” or “Haven’t decided where to spend Saturday’s evening? A hip parrot will accompany you,” the cheerful ads stand out against the dull real estate announcement and job offers.
The ads have become quite popular – all the sketches get taken soon after Vinokurova sticks them to the noticeboards around the city center.
“Most of the pictures are taken away in couple of hours,” she says.
Many takers boast their torn-off pictures on Instagram and Twitter with a #picspocs hashtag.
It takes Vinokurova 30 minutes to draw a sketch ad. The ads go up every day except Sunday.
Vinokurova, a media manager on maternity leave, says she has been fond of drawing since childhood. Recently she has decided to change her career and become an illustrator.
“The illustration classes start in autumn. In summer I decided to improve my skills by making these sketches,” says Vinokurova.
When people started posting the images of her sketches on Facebook, Vinokurova became a real social media star.
“I receive nearly 100 messages from Canada, U.S. and even from China and Japan every day,” she says. “People like the idea and ask me if they can put up such ads in their home towns.”
Seeing the interest in her sketches, Vinokurova has posted patterns of the ads to her Facebook page. Now anyone can upload the pictures, print them out and put them up.
“My only requirement is that these ads are not used for commercial purposes,” Vinokurova adds.
Dresses, cocktails, longboards and moustaches are among her illustrations, yet the images of quirky animals attract more interest. Among the several dozen ads that she has already drawn, Vinokurova says that the one featuring pugs is her favorite.
Yet online people like my hogs the most,” the artist says.
What started as exercises seems to have turned into a serious step in Vinokurova’s artistic career.
Thanks to her popularity, the artist is involved in five different projects where she works as an illustrator. Recently Vinokurova got a job offer from an international company to make prints for a new brand of clothing for kids.
“I used to think that creating new prints for clothes would be my top achievement as an illustrator, but now it appears to be just the beginning,” she said.
See more of Vinokurova’s pictures on her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/nastya.vinokurova and in the online version of this article at www.kyivpost.com/lifestyle.
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be reached at [email protected]
