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Animator Vs. Cartoonist Draw Each Other • Draw Off

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BuzzFeed’s most-requested Draw-Off finally turns the pencils on the artists themselves.

For years, “Draw-Off” has sent its BuzzFeedVideo regulars racing against the clock to sketch everything from 1990s cartoons to Pixar characters to the cast of Avatar: The Last Airbender. In November 2019, the series finally gave in to its comment section and pointed the sketchpads at the artists themselves. The result was “Animator Vs. Cartoonist Draw Each Other • Draw Off,” a timed portrait battle built around real-life likeness instead of nostalgia.

• Producers built the episode around what they called the series’ “#1 most requested subject” pulled straight from audience comments.
• Special guest animator Stephanie Alexander joined the regular Draw-Off panel, which typically features cartoonist Kevin McShane and animator Nick Butera.
• The prompt broke from the show’s usual memory-based pop-culture sketches to focus on capturing each other’s actual physical features and personal quirks.

The Format Fans Kept Asking For

Draw-Off’s usual gimmick is testing how well an artist remembers something they didn’t have in front of them — a ’90s Saturday-morning character, a Pixar sidekick, the exact shade of Aang’s arrow tattoo. Turning that format on the cast members themselves solved a request producers said kept surfacing in the comments: stop drawing cartoons from memory and draw us instead. It’s the kind of self-referential bit that recurring web series lean on once they’ve built a loyal audience that knows the players by name.

Cartoonist Meets Animator, Pencil to Pencil

The episode kept the show’s usual two-lane structure — cartoonist Kevin McShane, who oversees the recurring format, working opposite animator Nick Butera — but swapped the subject matter for something the artists actually had to look at rather than recall. Working live on drawing pads under the format’s typical time constraints, each participant had to translate a real face into their own style: McShane’s comic-strip shorthand against Butera’s more fluid, animated line work.

Stephanie Alexander Joins the Panel

Rounding out the lineup was guest animator Stephanie Alexander, brought in specifically for the real-life challenge. Adding a third artist to the usual two-person dynamic gave the episode more portraits to compare and more opinions in the room once the drawings came out — a small tweak that changed the math on who was judging whom.

Judging the Likeness

Draw-Off episodes typically end the same way: a reveal, a laugh, and a debate over who actually nailed the assignment. This one was no different, except the assignment was each other’s faces instead of a cartoon character’s.

The gang finally tackled the “#1 most requested subject” from the comments — themselves.

The mutual critiques that closed out the episode leaned on the same friendly ribbing that’s kept fans coming back to segments like Funniest Interview Ever as actors go off the rails and the reaction-heavy format of When ‘Hot Ones’ Guests Get Overconfident… (Seasons 1-10) — content built less on a clean winner and more on watching people who know each other well roast one another on camera.

No score was posted, no trophy handed out — Draw-Off has never needed one. The episode ends the way it always does: McShane, Butera and now Alexander holding up their pads, taking their shots at each other’s caricatures, and leaving it to whoever’s watching to decide who actually got the nose right.