Genesis frog

genesis frog, or simply Genesis, is an American YouTuber and artist known for their animatics that utilize lineless art and bright color schemes. Genesis, who uses any pronouns, has been known to not only draw art inspired by a variety of fandoms, including One Piece and Minecraft YouTube, but to also on occasion share art made of their original characters.
Genesis' work draws heavily on the "lyricstuck" tradition from the Homestuck fandom - a form of storytelling in which an artist draws each lyric in a song, writing the words in the piece itself, and then setting the art to music. Genesis took the format and adapted it over time, eventually finding their own style that allowed them to adapt techniques from the popular trend of animatics.
Their art style tends to be simple, with emphasis on dynamic angles and dramatic poses; the art they make for their videos tends to be lineless and uses saturated, bold colors.
== Early Work ==
Genesis' earliest four videos are unlisted, but can still be accessed in a playlist of their polished art videos. The unlisted videos were posted between January 2016 and August 2017. Three of these videos focused on original characters and one was inspired by Homestuck. Unlike the rest of their work, the majority of these videos were in grayscale, but the roots of their current style can be seen even then.
== Casual Period ==
In August 2018, one year after its predecessor, Genesis uploaded "one piece | marathon runner". This animatic centered around a character from the manga One Piece. This was Genesis' first deliberate foray into limited but colorful palettes, and forced Genesis to innovate, inspiring the first of the lineless art on the channel.
"Marathon Runner' kicked off a period of rare uploads, only posting new videos once every few months or so; however, the gap of time in between allowed time for larger leaps in art improvement. The next three videos Genesis would upload would all be inspired by One Piece as well. Of these, the ones to gain the most traction would be the first two - "Marathon Runner" and "Secret for the Mad".
The most notable of these for their development is "one piece | demon kitty rag", which ended the casual period of the channel. In "Demon Kitty Rag", Genesis began to experiment with basic animation by including human and cat walk cycles in the title screen. It was drawn over a two-week period.
Throughout the casual period, Genesis uploaded several speedpaints: the first being of a Minecraft YouTuber, JoeHillsTSD, the latter two being portraits of their original characters. These speedpaints are entirely unedited and were recorded in Autodesk Sketchbook on their phone, which was the art program they used for years.
== Minecraft YouTube Era ==
The speedpaint of Joe Hills heralded something important: that Genesis was interested in Minecraft YouTube. After rediscovering the joys of Minecraft YouTubers in August of 2019, they became very invested in servers such as Hermitcraft and events like MC Championships. This eventually lead to Genesis watching MC Championships 9 live and, a few days later, stumbling upon Frostbyte Freeman's essay "How The Blue Bats Won MCC 9". Heavily inspired by his essay and by their favorite player's history-making second win in MCC 10, Genesis uploaded the first video from the Minecraft YouTube Era, "mcc 9 & mcc 10 | remember the name (also ft. hbomb94)", on October 15, 2020.
"Remember the Name" was intended to be less polished than Genesis' previous work, going back to the grayscale coloring from the pre-casual period days and being largely sketches; unlike its predecessors, Genesis incorporated a handful of specific colors to pop against the gray and used those to their advantage. Like "Demon Kitty Rag", it had moments of animation, although it incorporated them directly into the body of the work instead of simply using the animation in the introduction. "Remember the Name" became quickly beloved by fans of the player teams depicted and it took off, eventually finding its way to some of the players involved. Notably, Hbomb94 was requested to react to it on stream, but due to copyright concerns he watched it while muted. He spent a few minutes watching wondering when he would arrive and jokingly made a big deal out of being ignored, although his part was toward the end. As a joke, Genesis changed the title to include "also ft. hbomb94" as a nod to his "complaints".
Six weeks later, Genesis posted "dream smp | how far we've come". Harkening back to their old fandom days, they were inspired to make a video recapping the events of Dream SMP's first season. However, what is most notable about this is that Genesis' friend pomodoko watched the video and felt so inspired that she asked for permission to treat Genesis' work like storyboards and make a more polished version. Genesis approved, and pomodoko's version took off in the algorithm, eventually getting over one hundred thousand views and being seen by several members of the server.
"dream smp animatic | bitter water" was the final video that Genesis drew on their phone screen. With this they deliberately brought back their colorful video style to tell another story from the Dream SMP.
After another short video about their original characters to test out new art programs, Genesis leapt back into the swing of things in 2021 when, on February 2, they uploaded their most popular video, "dream smp | the villain i appear to be". They continued to use limited color schemes, but changed color palettes to represent the mood and tone of the part of the character's arc they were illustrating. Due to their brushes changing, the art has a more precise and clean feel to it.
Their most recent upload, "future smp | everybody loves me", takes a similar approach to "Demon Kitty Rag", in that it doesn't tell a single distinct arc, but rather it touches on and dances around events from the story, and mixes dark or tragic events with levity and fun. In the description, Genesis describes it as a "love letter to the Future SMP". It had the most scuffed creation process of all of them, due to Genesis losing power for several days midway through the project. Despite the hardships, it's beloved by the creators it was intended for and by the small community of fans (mostly from twitter) who are dedicated to the story they're telling.
Category:Art YouTubers
Category:American YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2013
Category:LGBT YouTubers