The #drawahorse hashtag is something that took off very recently, and it all started here at City University, London.
We at Interhacktives would be missing a trick if we didn’t explain how it all started, so we got in touch with the person behind it all, a Mr Thomas Carlo Morris, AKA @iamdjcarlo, to tell us what exactly spawned the fun that’s seen  @Fieldproducer, Nick Robinson and the artist from War Horse all get involved.
So the concept for drawahorse basically came out of a couple of things. As a kid, me and my sister were easily bored at restaurants. My dad, who I suspect was sometimes similarly bored with us complaining about it, decided that the best way to keep us engaged until the food arrived was in various competitions. One of them included -every now and then- drawing a horse.
Years later, early teenhood school trips introduced me to the Lad’s Mag. One in particular was Loaded. In every interview I can remember (not many to be fair), each interviewee was asked to draw a horse at the end of his session. The artistry of said horse then bestowed proportional degrees of “Laddishness” onto the drawer.
It was to this rich tapestry of heritage and tradition that my mind wandered then, in the middle of some sort of sermon on the industrial revolution and its relation to entrepreneurial journalism. Having delicately sketched myself an equine quadruped, I looked upon it, and it was good. And so I leant forwards and said unto the row infront, “hey mate, have a go at drawing a horse, it’s fucking hard.”
That done, I got the rest of my row to follow suit. And obviously had to tweet about it. This led to the invention of the #drawahorse tag by Rob Porter and, ultimately, Nick Stylianou’s decision to make a tumblr account collating all the posts. After that, everything sort of spiralled into what can only be described as random acts of trollery and procrastifun.
So I’d be lying if I said it was really anything more than a laugh, but as laughs go, it’s pretty good. When we got the artist from War Horse tweeting us her drawings, we knew we’d caught someone’s eye! Then, during a lecture in online journalism, Mr. Paul Bradshaw handed me the floor, in what I suspect was an attempt to subvert any acts of guerrilla horse drawing, and got me to explain myself. I can’t say how well that worked, only that since then, I’ve had a pretty steady stream of horses flowing in.. Added to that, some other “celeb” horses include Roy Greenslade and (although I’ve yet to see it) Nick Robinson. I would love it to trend though. I mean, come on, who hasn’t lent back from their desk one day, yawned and thought, “Sod it, I’ll #drawahorse…”
– All pictures can be tweeted to @drawahorse or @iamdjcarlo and flagged up with the #drawahorse tag. For more horseplay and horsing around check out draw-a-horse.tumblr.com