Since its inception and subsequent rise to popularity, Instagram has given birth to a new class of artists. Artists who use social media to reach a audience wider than traditional mediums would otherwise allow them to reach. One such artist is London-based architect Charles ‘Insta-chaz’ Hutton AKA the guy who explains yours – and everyone else’s – adult life through cheeky graphs and caricatures drawn on yellow post-it notes.
We asked Charles how he got the idea to start the Instagram account Insta-Chaz and he claims it to be a mere happenstance. In his own words, it started as a result of his inability to keep track of the group chat he was in with some of his friends. He says that
rather than actually write anything in the group, I’d draw pictures for it and post them as my responses. Eventually everyone got sick of that and demanded that I put them all in an Instagram.
Charles admits that he had no expectations of the massive following his account has garnered in such a small time. He says that the plan was to “just put them (the post-its) out there and see what happened.”
Charles’ pieces can take anything from ten minutes to three weeks to make depending on the idea and the complexity of the topic at hand. Defining his process, he says,
The process is fairly straight forward – I’ll usually think of an idea or a thing that might work and then I’ll draw a rough sketch of it – once I’ve worked out what it’s going to look like I’ll do a good copy where I try (and often fail) to do it without spelling mistakes.
His ideas most usually come from conversations with friends. He also sometimes takes suggestions from his followers, whipping up a hilarious post within very little time. The writer of this article (that would be me!) inadvertently challenged him a few weeks ago to make one about the ‘ineffectiveness of team meetings’. Unsurprisingly so, Charles made a graph that hit the virtual nail on its head (see Exhibit A).
Exhibit A – The result of the gauntlet thrown by me on Instagram.
Discussing the use of social media in art in today’s age and time, Charles calls it to be “both a pain-in-the-arse and also a necessity. For me, it’s been obviously instrumental in getting my drawings out there, so in many ways my content is born from social media.”
Taking one of the biggest leaps of his life, Charles recently announced on his Instagram account that he was quitting his job in architecture to pursue ‘this’ full time (he admits on Instagram that he’s yet to come up with an actual job title), thanking his followers for all that they’ve done.
If this isn’t #IQuitMyJobGoals then we don’t know what is!
We asked him if it was an easy thing to do and he says,
It’s always frustrating when you read about people taking a leap and then they talk about how easy it is. It’s not actually an easy thing to do if you’re not going to be able to pay the rent once you’ve taken the leap. It took me a few months to get myself into a position where I could do it financially. But once all that is sorted, then taking the leap is actually quite fun.
Happenstance it may have been, but we at TYS are sure glad to be able to see new hilarious posts on our Instagram feeds daily. We wish Charles all the success in the world for following his art and quirky sense of humour!
