The latest artist to generate buzz on reddit prides himself on being awful.

The speedy painter, who goes by the handle "Shitty_Watercolour," has made an art out of depicting the action in the sprawling community site's many threads. And despite his self-deprecating opinion of the 2,000 or so paintings he's blasted onto reddit in the past three months, he's developed a unique style that's instantly recognizable amid a sea of screengrabs and animated GIFs.

"I started doing watercolors after I found an old painting set that I must have been given when I was younger," the 18-year-old artist, who asked that his name not be revealed, said in an email to Wired. "I already frequented reddit, and it was only a case of putting the two together that my account came around."

The anonymous artist said 99 percent of his paintings are inspired by reddit. While his watercolors are entirely original, the idea of "novelty accounts" on reddit is not: Shitty Watercolour's contemporaries include Sure, I'll Draw That, Etch-A-Sketcher and even some redditors who recorded comments in barber-shop-quartet style to post on the site's endless threads. But he's the latest to use the website as a launch pad for internet fame, getting thousands of views and racking up a ton of link and comment karma seemingly overnight.

Despite being largely based on text and thumbnails, reddit serves as a surprisingly rich creative resource for visual artists. Having a vast pool of creative types cranking out art inspired by any given thread creates an environment where users try to make comments worthy of being adapted, said reddit general manager Erik Martin. (Disclosure: Wired and reddit are corporate cousins.)

>"The first time you see it, you're like, 'Oh, a lot of work went into that!'" — Erik Martin

"The really great thing about things like Shitty Watercolour is [the posts are] unexpected," Martin told Wired. "When you go into a comment thread and the first time you see it, you're like, 'Oh, a lot of work went into that!' ... It's one of the nice sort of gems that make comments worth exploring in reddit."

The artist began his rise to reddit fame by re-creating photos people posted on the site, but has since moved on to illustrating stories that appear in the AskReddit subcategory and providing visual interpretations of reddit commenters' usernames. (He takes requests).

In addition to posts on the site, Shitty Watercolour has been branching out on Twitter, where he's taken to posting paintings of famous people and then asking followers to name them. He's also dedicated a Tumblr site to posting his images.

The fact that the artist has chosen to remain anonymous has spawned an aura of mystery and even caused some to speculate that he is, in reality, Roald Dahl collaborator Quentin Blake. (He denies that he is.) What he will say is that he "just left full-time education" and that he'll probably be going to college next year to study politics, philosophy and economics.

"I may decide to take a gap year," he said. "Which would probably be spent painting thousands more shitty watercolors, for as long as people want to see them."

Take a look at some of Shitty Watercolour's best work (and the reddit threads they were inspired by) – including an image of the summer movie season's biggest heroes that he created exclusively for Wired – in the gallery above.