Ems Crumby is an illustrator and animator in the third and final year of her University illustration course. As of March 2025, she has more than a hundred thousand followers across TikTok and Instagram, where she posts her uniquely evocative illustrations of life, people, iconic retro-inspired items, and existential comfort, along with short animated films featuring some of her drawings. When she looks back over the past few years, a few moments stand out to her.
Finding an Audience
Ems still remembers the first time her art really found an audience online.
When she was in high school, her TikTok art account was “secret” for a while. She used it to post her illustrations and early animated shorts. So it was a (very) pleasant surprise when she woke up one morning to a deluge of notifications. Every piece on the account had gone viral at once, and thousands of people from all over the world were liking, sharing, following, and messaging her about her art. Soon after that, her account hit 15K followers.
Her first big art commission is another very significant moment. During her foundation course in 2021, when Ems was 19 years old, she was contacted to work on a music video for Frank Turner, the accomplished punk/folk singer and songwriter. Polydor Records reached out to her on the address listed in her TikTok profile, but she initially overlooked the email inviting her to work on the video. It was only a few days later, when Ems was looking for something else in her inbox, that she read the email properly and replied that she would be glad to work on it.
When Ems looks back on the experience, she remembers how positive her first professional gig was, overall, but she also sometimes looks at the steepness of the learning curve with wonder. Before that, she had only ever made animations on her iPhone with FlipaClip, and she had to go straight from that to working on an iPad with the Apple Pencil – for the first time – for a major record label music video.
The song is called “A Wave Across a Bay”; it is 3 minutes and 42 seconds long. Ems had to illustrate and animate a total of 1,776 frames in around 60 days. It was often hectic, and she had to spend time learning new skills, but she really liked the project. She was mindful of treating the very serious topic of the video sensitively during the concept creation phase.
Ems worked on storyboarding the whole video before illustrating and animating it. She didn’t really have a model available 24×7 to use as a reference so that the animated movements would be fluid; she ended up taking videos of herself in the required poses as reference. She thus ended up being the model, illustrator, and animator. The end result was a hit with the people who viewed the video, though, and it was her first big client project.
“Sisyphus”
As of March 2025, “Sisyphus” is one of Ems’ most recent animation projects. It is a 27-second traditionally hand-drawn 2D animated video. It is based on the concept of absurdism in Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, and examines his concept of mechanical living. It feels like every mundane day ever, invested with nostalgia and wholesomeness and authenticity and occasional claustrophobia, like a movie made about ordinary everyday life that brings out the absurdism inherent in it.
Ems created “Sisyphus” after taking a short break from animation, during which she chose to focus on improving her technical drawing skills. The 100 frames that make up the video are all hand-drawn with graphite powder and mechanical pencils. The frames were then sequenced on Procreate Dreams. It was created over two months, in October and November 2024.
The title of “Sisyphus” was inspired, of course, by the Greek mythological character of the same name. Ems chose the name after reading “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. The endlessly repetitive character of many elements of daily life echoes the fate of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a steep hill in Tartarus for all eternity. Even though his fate was horrific, this daily-life inspired version of the Sisyphean fate also makes us think of the fond memories associated with “boring” everyday rituals. Like Camus’s application of the myth to daily life, the animation showcases the absurdity and mechanical nature of modern living.
“Sisyphus” plays with time in a way that is unique. From the opening frame of the clock ticking away to the time capsules of the Windows XP and Nokia devices that transport us to a bygone era, a time when technology and life were both simpler, to the circular nature of how the short is bookended by the things we do early in the morning and late at night, it feels like we’ve lived an entire day by the time we finish watching all 27 seconds, but that day also stretches out to feel like many days threaded together, like an entire life. And the decision to use visual cues to place “Sisyphus’ in the 90s is genius; there’s a time travel aspect to the whole experience, and so it’s simultaneously a day in the life, an entire life, and a trip down memory lane that you can (and do) watch on loop. It captures an intangible complex emotion.
The illustrations that make up “Sisyphus” are lovingly crafted, and each is a work of art that Ems worked on for days till it was just right. For example, she remembers looking up hundreds of photographs of alarm clocks, and took the time to create the perfect composite of images, finally ending up drawing the iconic opening shot that feels like the accompaniment to every bleary-eyed morning before smartphone snooze screen taps became commonplace.
“Sisyphus” uses movement in many different ways, all of them effective. The clock hand, and the egg in the frying pan, and the clothes in the washing machine all go round and round, making us reflect subconsciously on the circular nature of life, and how we do many of the same things day in and day out. The video also feels incredibly dynamic – there is the feeling of living on an eternal treadmill where, like the Red Queen in “Through the Looking Glass”, we must keep running to stay in the same place, like the hare running across a field in “Sisyphus”. Depending on your frame of mind when you’re watching the video, you can either feel trammelled by the constraints of your daily schedule (the long hallway hits particularly hard in such a mood), or pleasantly diverted down rabbit-holes when you see various objects of cultural significance that have evolved but are still firmly a part of life today.
“Sisyphus”: Process of Creation
Concept: Even though the finished version of “Sisyphus” is very coherent in terms of how it depicts its theme, Ems didn’t start off with the finished concept and a neat project plan. Her creative process started with two drawings that later made it into the final version: the retro Nokia phone (the gold standard of indestructibility), and the van. They aren’t chronologically the first two illustrations that appear in the animation either.
At the same time, she was reading The Myth of Sisyphus, and the drawings fit the theme of identifiable, iconic everyday objects. She will often build up a bank of drawings between projects – they don’t necessarily have a grand unifying connection initially, but in this case the idea of creating something that helped viewers laugh at life, a depiction of the repetitiveness of life really resonated with Ems.
Adding more Scenes: After Ems came up with the theme for the animation based on her initial drawings, she started planning more scenes. Her drawing process started with research, looking up all the aesthetics that are associated with the object(s). In this case, she settled on the period that “Sisyphus” would be set in: once it became clear that it was to depict suburban/urban life around the turn of the millennium, it became much easier to decide on imagery.
With “Sisyphus”, Ems had a fair idea of the objects she associated with the overall theme, and that people would relate to. She spent a lot of time on Internet Archives and Wikimedia Creative Commons, delving deep into the iconography and imagining how she would draw it.
Drawing Process and Music: Ems created draft versions of her drawings using light pencil lines until she was satisfied; the final step was shading over the lines, often with the TV on in the background. She created three versions of each drawing to help make the animation easier. Music was also a huge part of the creation of “Sisyphus”: while working on the project, Ems listened to a few songs on loop, including “Flim” by Aphex Twin, “15 Step” and “All I Need” by Radiohead, and “Know Your Enemy” by Rage Against the Machine. These tracks played an important role in informing the feel of the drawings.
Animation: Once Ems had created enough frames, the whole video started coming together in her head, and the animation snapped into place with relative ease. She knew the order that would work best, and she worked in step with her chosen music to get the pacing exactly right, and to make the final output really cohesive.
Support: Drawings are a calm space, and her major projects like “Sisyphus” can often take up large chunks of time. She is very grateful to her amazingly supportive family – including her mum and dad who always know about the project she’s working on, and her sister who texts her once a day during the final phase to ask if the video is done yet, and who is always the first to like and comment after the end result is posted to social media. Her friends are also equally supportive.
Working With Brands
Multiple major brands have reached out to Ems for custom projects via the contact details on her TikTok page. When she works on an advertisement, she is careful to examine the brief to make sure that it fits her art style and overall ethos; she has turned down brand offers when she didn’t see a place for her art in the vision.
One memorable brand collaboration was with Burberry in 2023. The campaign featured animators from all over the world.
Her collaborations with Microsoft Surface and Florasis were also very positive experiences.
“A Late Night”
A drawing that Ems had a lot of fun with is “A Late Night’, which was created during a remote life drawing class.
“A Late Night” is a great example of how her imagination transforms a live drawing to something completely new and unexpected. During the remote drawing session, the model wasn’t standing in a bathroom, and there was no fortuitously placed toothbrush. Ems took the pose as a starting point to create “A Late Night”. The final result conveys a sense of playful intimacy, a perfect moment captured at the end of a long day. It allows people to imagine themselves in the place of the model after coming back home, perhaps, from a night out, getting ready for bed.
“A Late Night” showcases her ability to blend humour with examinations of the human condition. It’s a genre that she owns in a lot of her art: existential comfort. You could almost imagine this particular piece as the wallpaper of a computer screen while soft beats play: white noise that lulls you to sleep.
“A Late Night” uses a fairly consistent colour palette to convey two very different moods in the same piece. The background – of the bathroom – is gritty, almost harsh, urban, all greys and browns. You could almost imagine it as a background environment in a film noir-inspired video game, perhaps one set in the 90s but imbued with the soul of a Raymond Chandler novel. It also feels very real even though it is quite stylised.
And then, pretty much the same colour palette is used for the main character in the foreground, only this time it conveys warmth and comfort after a long day and the familiarity of bedtime routines and playfulness and vitality. It is rare to observe such contrast with so much economy of colour. And the shadows are very understated in this piece; their textures, with their strong parallel lines, set the tone for the grittiness and almost-realism, while their darkness is comforting, and brings to mind moments spent in one’s room in quiet solitude.
“A Late Night” is also special because of its subtle commentary on censorship. Social media has always treated male and female bodies differently, and depicting female toplessness – even in a piece of art – is usually a way to speedrun getting your post restricted or taken down. But this piece thumbs its nose at the “rules”, and is a playful and irreverent way to comment on unequal treatment while still creating a great piece of art.
Portraits
A lot of the drawings that Ems creates are graphite-on-paper portraits of her friends. These renditions are exceptional in that they feel as immersive as short videos, despite being static images. They also make you go “I bet the person in the portrait is interesting” even if you don’t know them at all; they are slices of life expertly carved and presented by Ems. They feel like they have light and sound and colour and three dimensions, even when they don’t actually have all those things. They have souls.
Ems thinks that one of the biggest reasons she is able to create the portraits she does is because of her love for her friends. She has a close-knit group of friends whom she’s known since she was 14, and the portraits are one way of expressing how much she appreciates them. She has a small digital camera that she carries everywhere, and she uses it to capture little moments from their time together – souvenirs of a story that was great at the time, or just candid shots that she was lucky to snap at just the right time.
She embraces retro tech while taking the photos that she might one day turn into portraits; the current digital camera is the latest in a long line of devices bought off of ebay; it takes blurry photos, and the flash often catches the subject(s) off guard, but that’s precisely when she gets the best pictures, and the graininess of the reference images works in their favour. They work well with her art style, which is realistic and yet stylised. Sometimes her brain needs to fill in the gaps when a part of the photograph is too blurry or too bright to be made out, and that fits her aesthetic too. She doesn’t love creating portraits based on iPhone photos; she doesn’t really need high resolution or 100% realism.
Ems loves the work of Caroline Mills, and how playful and humorous her felt-tip diary drawings are. She is also a fan of the animations and illustrations of Alice Bloomfield.
Observational Humour
Even though a thread of playfulness and humour runs through quite a few of her pieces, there are some that seem as intricately plotted and scripted as a really strong piece of sketch comedy, or a layered standup joke. “Death to the Family Computer” is one such – a light-hearted look at a common life occurrence.
It is based on a pair of events, either of which is familiar to most of us. When Ems was much younger, she accidentally downloaded a virus to the family computer. A couple of years ago, on a trip home from University, she did it again, and the computer crashed. It was then that she was inspired by the ridiculousness of the situation to begin working on an entire short film.
“Death to the Family Computer” is great for many reasons – first, it provides a solid visual background to anchor the observational humour. Most of us know and love the PCs from a couple of decades ago, and the deliberately retro choices of the mouse and floppy disk port only serve to accentuate how relatively clunky the computers of the past were. The lovingly rendered Windows XP default wallpaper is another portal to a deep well of comfortingly banal images from earlier in our lives.
But then the popups start, and each of them is carefully scripted and drawn, each hitting you like a one-liner. The deliberately fast pace of the animation is another great choice; you can’t fully take the time to laugh at each successive popup window before the next fills your screen, and so you watch again, and again, and again. Popup screens have never been so fascinating. And there are also running jokes that develop through the few seconds that “Death to the Family Computer” is on your screen.
The end showcases how effortlessly Ems blends comedy and existential musings; the short ends with a question (“Is this the life you imagined?”) before the Family Computer shuts down.
Everyone has a joke about annoying popup windows and annoying Windows windows and old computers. But it’s rare that a lot of visual jokes on the same topic come together in a 14 second video, and that’s why “Death to the Family Computer” is special.
Social Media and Art
Ems has more than 101,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram as of March 2025. But she doesn’t do what social media gurus tell you to do. There are no daily low-effort posts that are scheduled to go up exactly at 5 PM (except on Sundays, nobody posts on Sundays), or carefully curated hashtags culled from a billion trending lists, or stories that go up every two hours, or polls, or broadcast channels. Instead, she posts her favourite illustrations when they’re ready, and occasional detailed animated short films. And yet her followers increase faster than graphite powder spreads all over an artist’s hands, and hundreds and thousands of people comment about how much they love her art style, the execution of her themes, and the little details.
It wasn’t always this way. A few years ago, when Ems was 19, she felt the pressure to post multiple times a week, and she found herself falling into the trap of churning out low quality animations to feed the algorithm. Fortunately, she realised quite quickly that it was bad for her personal artistic practice, and that social media numbers were not important to her. Art was – and is – much more important, and she decided to post when her art was ready, and not spend time on following a daily content creation routine.
A very common comment on her posts, on both TikTok and Instagram, is that her pieces help sum up feelings that the viewers could not describe, and her visual expression of those emotions provides clarity and catharsis and the warm haze of memory. She also really likes interacting with people who message her asking for advice or talking about her art, and she loves sharing what she’s learnt. Ems is completely self-taught as an animator; it was a hobby for a long time, and she used tutorials and trial and error to teach herself 2D animation.
Existential Comfort: Studies of Three Drawings
Ems has the ability to make the mundane feel special, and it is on display in these three drawings, which we chose because of their diverse subjects (human / exterior of building / interior). And also because we really like them.
“Milk Run” makes the most routine of daily errands feel cinematic. None of us ever think of the actual act of carrying home a carton of milk, or of how we look during a milk run. But the drawing puts both the milk and its bearer front and centre. The perspective of the buildings on either side of the street make them look like they narrow to a point at the back of the image, almost like there’s a spotlight on the main character. Tangled earphones, pesky loose strands of hair, a carton whose shape and size are just awkward enough to make carrying it hard, and the carefully differentiated textures (leather, fabric, plastic, stone), all combine to make the world of “Milk Run’ feel real, like we’re walking that same road trying to get an errand done so we can get on with our lives.
This quick sketch of a house from a walk home might look simple, but it is evocative. The heavy shadows and soft smudging create an atmosphere that feels as if the house itself is holding onto something unsaid. The tilted perspective, just slightly off-kilter, mirrors the way we remember places, not with perfect fidelity, but with feeling. The tangled telephone wires stretch across the sky like veins, a reminder of unseen connections, of voices carried through lines, of stories whispered into the wind.
And then there’s the absence. The empty windows, the untouched sky, the way the house stands, watching but unwatched. It’s a feeling many of us know well; the sense of passing by something every day, never truly stopping, yet somehow it becomes a part of us. In this drawing, it becomes everyone’s; a universal symbol of places we pass, moments we almost forget, and the quiet beauty of simply noticing.
“A Kitchen Study” offers a fascinating array of interpretations; its meaning is in the eye of the beholder. One person might look at it and think about how kitchens are usually lively, filled with warmth and movement, but here, everything is frozen. The checkered floor, usually a symbol of homeliness, feels cold and distant. The open door leading into darkness adds an eerie sense of mystery; has someone just left? Or was this place always empty? The radiator against the tiled wall reinforces this sense of time standing still, hinting at a presence that once was but is no longer.
Another person might look at it and observe that the addition of one or two people to it would instantly transform it into a space that was alive and vibrant, albeit one that lent itself to Portishead or Radiohead playing in the background – a moody masterpiece.
All three drawings may be very different, but they all help us look at our lives with other eyes, which is the point of all art.
The Future
After graduating, Ems would like to start selling some of her illustrations. She would also like to extend her work as an animator to direct larger projects as an auteur; she looks forward to collaborating on projects where her strong creative vision can help achieve a shared goal. Ems dreams of her own little art studio somewhere in the future, in a place where she can work all day and see her friends and family in the evening.
Art, to Ems, is like any other important personal relationship in her life. There are great days, good days, and bad days; they sometimes fall out and don’t talk for a few days, but they always get back together.
Ems would like to thank…
…her mum, her dad, and her sister Katy. During her high school years, she had two loves: English Literature and art, and she chose to study illustration. Many parents might have discouraged that, but her family has always had her back. She is also very grateful to all her friends from her hometown and from her University.
Ems would also like to thank her grandmother Rose, for always encouraging her and nurturing her art.
Links
Ems Crumby – TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ems.crumby.
Ems Crumby – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ems.crumby/.