Get Out The Paint: The Story Behind NBA Twitter’s Most Artistic Account

If you’ve been in or around NBA Twitter since December 2020 then you’ve probably had the experience of being watched. There you are, minding your own business, having a hard time remembering what highlight you just zoned out watching when two beady little eyes stop you mid-scroll. You pause, instantly caught, and scroll slowly down to reveal an oblong, pixelated body awash in crayon-bright primary colors, or maybe an ice cube tray wearing a Hawks jersey, a cantaloupe with a headband on, or a sentient slice of cherry pie with legs, but whatever you land on you can be sure is smiling guilelessly back at the mirror expression now playing across your own face. You aren’t seismically changed, but you’re happier than you were a second ago.

“I love making everyone smile on the drawings,” NBA Paint (well, the person behind NBA Paint, who asked to remain anonymous) says over Zoom. “Like, they all have this blank eye little smile expression. There’s probably like, 10 drawings I’ve done where the faces are either frowns, or straight-line face.”

NBA Paint created their Twitter account in early December, posting drawings sprung from inside jokes initially conceived in their fantasy basketball group to a handful of followers mostly from their fantasy basketball group. But the plucky, unabashedly cheerful drawings soon drew engagement from fan accounts, including the occasionally mercurial Aron Baynes Fan Club with its nearly 70k followers, and “it started to pick up a ton of speed.”

“It kind of hurled it into this space where all of a sudden I went from having, like, 10 followers that were close friends of mine, to a couple of hundred,” NBA Paint says. “When I began to notice like, alright, maybe I shouldn’t do them all on my phone. It was getting a little exhausting, hunching over.”

There are now nearing 50k engaged followers awaiting each day’s drawing, illustrations that range from cute to knowingly hammy phonetic twists on players names, interpretations of that day’s (or hour’s) big story, and most recently, reimagined game highlights.

“If you look back at the first drawings I’ve ever done in NBA Paint, I was actually using Microsoft Paint browser on Safari on my phone. So I was drawing them all just with my finger on the phone. You can see I’m not really connecting all the lines and they’re coming out really choppy, but that was kind of my initial intention.”