What is Draw The Squad?

It's a fan art challenge where you pick a group photo with an awkward or flamboyant pose, then redraw the scene using your own characters or a cast from a fandom.

Where did Draw The Squad come from?

The 'Draw the Squad' phrasing was coined by Tumblr user garbageboi-archive in 2015, growing out of the earlier 'Draw your OTP' challenge posted by court-the-qunari on April 27, 2015.

What does Draw The Squad mean?

It's an invitation to reproduce a specific reference photo of a group, but with fictional characters swapped into each position, keeping the poses and composition intact.

How do you use Draw The Squad?

Pick a source image with a group in an interesting pose, map each character in your chosen cast onto a person in the photo, and redraw the scene; blank silhouette templates are also common.

Is Draw The Squad still popular?

By early 2016 the format had a Pinterest gallery with 571 followers and 833 DeviantArt results, and it stays a recognizable fan art template in drawing communities.

Draw The Squad

2015art challengeclassic

Published August 14, 2026

Draw The Squad is a fan art challenge where artists redraw a group photograph using their own characters or picks from a fandom, usually working from a reference with a dramatic or awkward pose. It grew out of the earlier 'Draw your OTP' template on Tumblr in mid-2015 and spread to Pinterest and DeviantArt within months.

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Overview

Draw The Squad is a fan art challenge where an artist picks a reference photo of a group posed in some flamboyant, awkward, or physically improbable way, then redraws the scene using their own original characters or a cast from a favorite fandom1. The reference can be almost anything: a staged boyband promo shot, a candid photo of friends piled on top of each other, a screencap from film or TV, or a purpose-built blank silhouette template made for the challenge3.

The format works with any group of two or more figures. When only two people appear in the source image, artists usually flip the caption to 'Draw your OTP' instead, keeping the same swap-in premise3. A closely related spinoff called 'Draw the OTP and the Third Wheel Best Friend' uses a specific 2007 photo of a guy sneaking a sip from a girl's drink while she kisses someone else, casting the sneak as the third-wheel character2.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Tumblr

Creator

garbageboi-archive

Date

2015

The wider drawing-challenge format began as 'Draw your OTP,' first documented in a post by Tumblr user court-the-qunari on April 27, 2015 titled 'New OTP Challenge,' which pulled in over 34,000 notes within its first ten months3.

The specific 'Draw the Squad' phrasing traces to Tumblr user garbageboi-archive, who captioned an image resembling a staged boyband album cover with the line3. That post gathered more than 62,000 notes across the following eight months3.

How It Spread

On July 6, 2015, a single-topic Tumblr blog called Squad Poses launched to reblog Draw the Squad art from across fandoms3. About a week later, on July 13, artist queen-norge posted a Draw the Squad version that racked up more than 4,700 notes on the same blog3.

By February 2016, a dedicated Pinterest gallery for the meme had 571 followers, while a DeviantArt search for 'draw the squad meme' returned 833 results3. The 'Third Wheel Best Friend' spinoff pulled from a photo that had been circulating online since at least September 2007, when the blog Feverish Thoughts posted it under the caption 'Sneaking a Drink'2. Tumblr user bumbleshark applied the caption 'draw the OTP and the third wheel best friend' to the same reference in mid-2015, giving the spinoff its name1.

How to Use This Meme

Typically an artist picks a source image with a distinct group composition, ideally one that looks awkward, dramatic, or physically ridiculous, then redraws the scene with their own cast mapped one-to-one onto the poses3. Blank silhouette templates are a common shortcut for artists who want to skip hunting for a reference photo3. For two-character source images, the convention is to switch the caption from 'squad' to 'OTP' and use a favorite shipping pair instead1.