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"Do you like adorable animals? Do you like adorable animals doing silly things? Do you like adorable animals doing silly things that have become Internet famous? Well, then, we've found your new favorite artist, a veritable Van Gogh of virality: Joshua Ellingson.\nThe San Francisco-based illustrator got a dose of Internet fame last week after creating an artistic rendering of \"Sara the Swing Dog\" (if you're not familiar, the video is basically what you would expect it to be... a dog on a swing). \"I started making these as warm-up sketches to get the juices flowing,\" Ellingson tells us. \"I read Laughing Squid and BoingBoing while I drink my coffee and there's always some silly video.\" \n\"Last week I saw the 'Swing Dog' video and decided to see how quickly I could finish a colored illustration. I posted it on Flickr and it got picked up by Laughing Squid and a few other blogs. Scott Beale from Laughing Squid encouraged me to keep doing them, and there's just been a lot of funny stuff to draw lately,\" he says.\nSo far, Ellingson has done five of these drawings, which you can see in the gallery below. Drawings like these are extremely shareable, since they're already tied to a viral entity. Still, the ability to render them in a way that's fresh and funny is key. \nEllingson isn't the first artist to undertake the task. Just take a look at Illustrated Missed Connections, Museum of Modern Tweets, the Facebook group \u201CI\u2019ll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held\" and Nic Rad's \"People Matter\" series, which features paintings of Internet celebrities.\nAll of these undertakings have taken off because they work in the same way a good parody does: They take something familiar and beloved and spin it into something new that can stand on its own. \"I think we live in social media reality now,\" Ellingson says, \"so most artists that work in this in and around this madness are going to be affected by it and it will come through in the work in some form.\"\nCheck out Ellingson's work below:\nThe Art\n\n\nMeme Animals\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nChinchilla Wearing A Paper Hat\nOriginal Video\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBaby Hamster Eating Broccoli\nOriginal Video\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBulldog Watching TV\nOriginal Video\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPapa, the Birthday Cat\nOriginal Video\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSara the Swing Dog\nOriginal Video\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/08/27/animal-meme-art/>