The thing about Shitty Watercolour is, he’s not all that shitty anymore. When web-based illustrator Hector Janse van Rensburg adopted the pseudonym four years ago, he didn’t much consider the prospect that he’d actually go on to make strides as a painter. His online devotees have been advising him of the irony (“you should rename yourself to Not-So-Shitty!”) ever since.

“Yeah,” van Rensburg says bashfully, “I’m not sure if the name was a mistake or not. I don’t see myself as a particularly creative or artistic person at all. I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

It all began one day in the summer of 2012, when the 18 year-old van Rensburg, bored and depressed after being rejected from Oxford University, picked up a cheap old set of watercolours and started to paint. He found himself sitting at his bedroom desk for days at a time, mixing and scribbling until it went dark outside. The process became a kind of therapy: he’d choose an image on the internet, copy it, upload it online – and repeat. “Mindless is definitely the word. It was a bit like data entry.”

Van Rensburg meanwhile gained notoriety on the clamorous threads of Reddit, where, under the alias Shitty_Watercolour, he’d post his pictures with jokey captions in response to Redditors’ comments. It made for quick inspiration, though the logistics could be surprisingly complicated. “The problem with Reddit is the timing,” he explains. “I’d log on at like 2 pm – that’s when everything starts going – and you can watch what trends are rising and what comments are popular, so it’s a calculated thing for me to work out what to paint and when.”

‘It’s like every day is the last minute deadline to come up with something new.’ Illustration: Shitty Watercolour

Over the following months he became more invested in his art as thousands followed him on various social media platforms. And suddenly his hobby wasn’t so therapeutic anymore. “As people liked them more and more I had a bit of an internal panic. It’s made me respect people in a creative job; it’s like every day is the last minute deadline to come up with something new.

“I realise I’ve brought it on myself, but apparently panicking and worrying has worked so far.”

For someone who suffers from watercolourist’s block, van Rensburg’s work rate is impressive. In his short career – which he juggles with a PPE degree at the University of York – he’s already produced several cardboard boxes’ worth of paintings. He reckons he has around 5,000 pieces stored away altogether.

The paintings themselves are a meme-savvy millennial’s answer to Quentin Blake; playful in style and humour, and thus apparently at odds with van Rensburg’s work ethic. “Every now and then, I’ll have to run away and do a painting at the last minute,” he says. “If I’m out with my flatmates and there’s a big event in the news and I want to paint something on it, I’ll just go home.”

And what do his friends make of his double life? “When we first moved into the flat I was recognised by three people in our block, which made them think I was really famous or something. I think they have a strange, disproportionate view of what I do.”

being a creator ✨ pic.twitter.com/Njdy370GAx — Shitty Watercolour (@SWatercolour) July 27, 2016

Being Shitty, it turns out, is a lonely occupation. “I’ve never really met anyone who does anything painty. I wish I had. I recently went to San Francisco and I did actually meet someone there who does drawings online, and we talked about drawing and how to do noses and ears and things. That was the first time I’d talked about drawing with anyone. It was nice.”

The closest thing he’s ever had to a mentor is an activity book by Quentin Blake himself: van Rensburg cites Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered as his only art lesson, which probably explains why much of SW’s earlier work looks like it was cribbed from a Roald Dahl novel.

It isn’t hard to see where SW got his inspiration for this 2013 painting. Illustration: Shitty Watercolour

Van Rensburg says he would love to be a full-time illustrator like his idol. “I don’t have plans to do anything PPE-related,” he says. “I might take an art course after I graduate. I do catch myself going on YouTube watercolour tutorials for beginners. It would be good to learn some of the basics...”

Vintage Shitty (March 2012). Illustration: Shitty Watercolour

Not many “beginners” regularly get commissions from national media outlets as van Rensburg does, but his sheer lack of confidence in his abilities appears unaffected. “I don’t really associate myself with the paintings. I started doing them in the most random way, and people like them for strange and different reasons. My friends will tell me, ‘I spoke to someone and they can’t believe that I know Shitty Watercolour’, and I’ll have to think for a second: wait, I am Shitty Watercolour!”

He adds: “I still think they look terrible.”

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