Emoji Art to Copy and Paste

Hello and welcome to Emoji Art! I made this site because I noticed that people are starting to make emoji pictures more often, especially on Twitter, WhatsApp and related sites. I figured that since people are making emoji drawings and sending emoji messages more often, that it would be a good idea to create a site where people could come and share their emoji creations and copy and paste emoji art to their social media posts really easily.

The emoji story starts with Unicode. In case you haven't heard of it before, its a standards body which helps the whole computing industry decide on which letters, characters and, in general, text that should be implemented and be usable by the operators of those devices. Huge players in the computing industry like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Windows, Mozilla and Apple have used Unicodes standards to decide on the symbols that should be renderable. This is particularly so for the big browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge. They are very quickly aligning with all of Unicode's text symbols. Fairly recently, Unicode introduced a large number of "emoji" characters into its specification. This means that text can actually contain emojis (not images embedded in text). Unicode has steadily introduced more emojis over the last few years and internet browser and operating systems (like iOS and Android) are also supporting textual emojis.

So we can now put emojis in any text that we want and just treat them like normal text characters - we can even copy and paste emojis just like we do with text! Along with this text emoji hype, there's been lots of experimentation with how they're used. Once such experimental exploration has been into the use of emojis in artwork - just like the original ASCII art used ASCII characters, so emoji art uses emojis. Emoji art may also use other Unicode symbols as well - text art with emojis is fairly common because there aren't enough emojis to represent all the different shapes required to do good emoji art. The difference between emoji pictures and ASCII are is simply that emoji pictures have a much stronger emphasis on the emoji characters.

The emoji icons used on this site are the open-source emoji set that originated on Twitter. They're big and cute and friendly compared the the other sets and that's why I decided to use them. This means that the emoji artworks on this site should translate into cool emoji art tweets without too much trouble.

Emoji Pictures

The term "emoji picture" usually refers to a specific type of emoji art: one in which emojis are used as "paint" rather than as actual parts of bodies/landscapes/etc. There is a lot of overlap between emoji pictures and emoji art, just as there is a lot of overlap between text art and emoji art, but it is often a useful distinction.

My intention in creating this site was for it to be mainly focused towards emoji art rather than pictures (according to the definitions above), mainly because I like the economy of character use in emoji art, and the smallness/compactness of them in conveying an idea. They're a bit like hieroglyphics in a sense because you can convey so much with only a few characters. If emojis are used as paint, then they tend to be much bigger and less skillful.

Emoji Drawings

I haven't been able to find any emoji-art-making tool yet, which is sort of tragic, and I haven't had time to make one in time for the release of this site, but I may create one at some point. In the mean time when creating emoji drawings your best bet is to use a website like facebook emojis which allows you to easily find and copy all the different emojis that you might desire.

Emoji drawings take time to create. There are hundreds of emojis to go through, and the positioning of the textual characters and emojis isn't as easy as painting on a canvas (yet) - you have to use spaces to align emojis and characters. But the cool thing is, a simple text pad is your "canvas" - emojis are just text characters, so if you've got a device that has a simple text pad, then you've got yourself a canvas for drawing emojis. But like I said, hopefully I'll be able to create a proper emoji art canvas, or someone else is able to create one that I can link to.

Emoji Messages

When copying and pasting emoji art into a Twitter Tweet, Facebook post, Messenger message, WhatsApp message, Instagram caption and almost any other social media platform, you need to be careful about how you format it. The main reasons for this is because different websites and apps use different fonts, and different fonts have different character (and emoji) widths, so while the emoji art may look fine on one website (like this one), when you paste it to a different site (like Facebook), the art may look warped or messed up. The simple solution to this is to just do some manual adjustment to to formatting of the emoji pictures that you use.

You'll also want to consider that if the artwork is too wide, most messenger applications will "wrap" the lines around so that the emojis are all tangled up and moved around. Messenger applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iPhone messenger all have fixed width messages which are usually quite narrow, so wider artworks won't work. If you've found some really cool/cute/funny emoji art that you want to post but it's too wide, you might have some luck removing spaces and characters so you can compress it horisontally without losing the charm of the piece.

If you're still into old-school SMS, and your phone supports text emoticons, then you should be able to copy the arts on this site into your SMS application just like normal, but there are some important things to take note of: Unlike with messenger applications and social networks, the emojis that are displayed on your phone may be different the the emojis displayed on the recipient's phone (especially if you both have different phone brands). This isn't a problem with messenger apps because the app defines a global set of emojis so that everyone sees the same thing. Your phone (or theirs) may also be missing some of the emojis because for some reason operating systems of phones tend to be lagging behind the websites, browsers and apps in terms of the emojis that they've implemented.

Emoji Combinations

A couple of apps have invented the "emoji puzzle" genre and it has spurred on a movement of combining different emojis to mean different things. This in turn has helped the emoji art movement to gain some new followers and artists. This site isn't for emoji combinations by themselves, but the meanings of different emoji combinations often find their way into emoji artwork nonetheless.

An example of an emoji combination is the "bull" emoji followed by the "poop" emoji. Together this means "bullsh*t", as you might have guessed. Emojis tend to represent nouns, and so by combining multiple nouns together we can usually create more complex ideas. Seeing the woman emoji next to a baby emoji automatically gives us the sense that this emoji combination must mean "mother", or at least there is the suggestion that the woman is a mother. People noticed this in the early days of emojis and so the emoji riddle genre was born.

I'd love to see some witty combinations of emojis in the art people create here on Emoji Art, so if you've got ideas

Emoji Scenes

One of the most delightful things to come out of the emoji craze (in my humble opinion) is the proliferation of emoji "scenes". These are cities, forests, villages, malls, beaches, mountains, or any of thousands of other types of landscapes which are made of emojis where each icon represents a component of the scene (a tree, a building, a bottle, etc.).

Check out the emoji art scenes topic to see what I mean. I think the reason I like them so much is because they remind me of the old isometic/orthogonal gameboy adventure games. Someone should make a browser emoji adventure game.

Emoji Conversations

Perhaps before emoji combinations, people were using combinations of emojis to express more complex meaning. A sneezing emoji followed by a crying emoji, for example expresses that the person is sick and sad. Given the ever expanding set of emojis available to people, the amount of information that can be conveyed in a small number of characters is increasing. More emojis mean that it's more likely there's an emoji to express just how you're feeling at any particular time.

People, of course, have taken this to the extreme and tried to have full blown conversations using only emojis. This is hard because adjectives, prepositions and articles are hard to represent in emojis, and there isn't a grammar which tells us how to interpret the ordering, spacing and "concept" structure within strings of emojis. Nevertheless, people have managed to have some interesting discussions using only emojis, just as they've been able to tell long and somewhat complex stories using only emojis.

Emoji art about love is quite common on this site, probably because of couples being cute and sending their boyfriend or girlfriend some emojis to express their love.

This site isn't specifically for conversations, but some of the emoji artworks will be good for copying and pasting into conversations that you're having.

Emoji Creations

That's the end of this little rant. Now go check out all the emoji creations on Emoji Art! There are lots of them, and if you love emoji art and design a good one, I hope you'll share it so that others can see it on this site, just as you've see other peoples' creations.