#ToonMe is taking over social media, and we're loving it

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We love a good creative challenge on social media, and right now there's one going on that presses all the right buttons. 

We're not entirely sure where or when the #ToonMe challenge originated. We were alerted to it by a tweet from our old friend Ben the Illustrator, and since then we've fallen down an online rabbit hole of people all over the world partly overpainting selfies with cartoon versions of themselves. 

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The rules seem to be nice and simple: just snap a selfie (try to make it an exciting and expressive one), take it into your favourite art app and paint over part of your portrait in your own particular cartoon style. (If you're stuck you can always follow our guide on how to draw manga, and check out our best iPad drawing apps for art app ideas.) Then post it on Twitter and Instagram with the #ToonMe and maybe #toonmechallenge hashtags attached. Sit back and watch the online adulation flood in. 

Many people are putting some kind of dividing line down the centre of their faces to enhance the look, and extending the toon-ified area to take in some of the background, but from our adventures scrolling through hundreds of #ToonMe posts today we can safely say that the best approach is to go with whatever looks right to you.

If you need inspiration then there's an awful lot of it about; it's hard to keep up with the flood of #ToonMe posts right now, especially if you're viewing them on Twitter where it tends to crop the images and you have to click through for a better look. For a more relaxed viewing experience we'd recommend searching for the #ToonMe hashtag on Instagram, preferably on desktop.

As with any online creative challenge, the end results can be a bit mixed. There's plenty of great work on show, but you'll also have to scroll through your fair share of examples where, well, they probably tried their best and that's what matters, right? 

To save you a bit of time, we've picked out some of our favourites from our online explorations:

That all adds up to the teeniest #ToonMe amuse-bouche. For the full experience, hit up the hashtag on Twitter or Instagram.

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