My playful gradient.horse project went viral - but exploded in different online communities at different moments. This gives us the opportunity to explore how people coming from these communities draw horses.
The horses shown here were selected randomly on a day when traffic from each site dominated - with non-horses, empty doodles, and transgressive images removed. Around 4% of all drawings turned out to be of penises - but this percentage differs greatly between the online communities.
It all started with a post on metafilter.com:
metafilter.com
a collective blog from the US.
5200 visitors, peak on 17 January 2026
4.2% of the drawings depict penises
typical horse drawings from Metafilter:
To better see the drawings you can disable the leg movement:
thompsonblog.co.uk
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/
A right wing political blog from the UK.
Somehow the spark went from a left wing US website to a right wing UK one.
2200 visitors, peak on 23 January 2026
8.6% of the drawings depict penises
typical horse drawings:
tumblr
Is known as a place where people who can draw hang out.
73000 visitors, peak on 8 February 2026
0.6% of the drawings depict penises
typical horse drawings:
bluesky
41000 visitors, peak on 10 February 2026
4.0% of the drawings depict penises
typical horse drawings:
hacker news
30000 visitors, peak on 14 February 2026
8.1% of the drawings depict penises
1.6% depict swastikas and/or racial slurs (very few were produced by other audiences)
typical horse drawings:
The New York Times
49000 visitors, peak on 19 March 2026
1.1% of the drawings depict penises
typical horse drawings:
This is of course not scientific research. It is not controlled for age, gender or users with a graphic tablet. However, it does demonstrate some noticeable differences in what and how people draw.
Many Tumblr users know how to draw, enjoy drawing, and draw playfully. To be playful, you obviously have to have some mastery of the medium - and this is my current theory on why communities with the least drawing skills also draw the most dicks. If you haven’t drawn anything since school, your drawing vocabulary may remain rooted in that time.
I like to think that gradient.horse is one of the rare spaces where creation is easier and more inviting than consumption. The imperfect and odd leg movements add whimsy to horses drawn at any skill level, acting as a skill equalizer. This imperfection and limitation is freeing and is probably key to a successful drawing game - if you were asked to draw a horse using any and all available artistic tools, you probably wouldn’t even start.
Contrast is just as important.
When I was making gradient.horse I started with the gradient.
The gradient was big. Eternal. Slow. So big it could fill the sky.
Naturally, it needed the horses. Small, tiny even, imperfect, as if drawn by a hungry five-year-old. They moved oddly.
It would have cost me nothing to make them move smoothly. But no. It is the eternal that moves smoothly. Here, on the earth, the imperfect hand-drawn creatures move as imperfectly as they are drawn.
And thus we have the huge, colorful, perfect, smooth gradient - and the whimsical, tiny, imperfect, jittery horses. And in between perfection and whimsy, in between eternal beauty and hobbling finger-drawn mares, there, only there is space for us to feel human again.
Come draw a horse.