Jazza (Josiah Brooks)

Jazza is the internet’s favorite art teacher: the Australian artist, animator, and entrepreneur whose Draw with Jazza channel taught millions of strangers how to draw — and who then decided the drawing channel was holding him back. Born Josiah Alan Brooks on April 20, 1989, he is the rare YouTuber whose classroom was a webcam, whose syllabus was anatomy, and whose students now number in the millions.

The origin story is pure early-internet. Jazza joined the animation hub Newgrounds in 2003 as a teenager, started submitting Flash games in 2006, and by 17 was landing sponsorships for his animations — a kid getting paid to make cartoons on the pre-YouTube web. After high school he went pro: producing animation and online video games, freelancing his way through the dying days of Flash. When the iPhone era killed Flash, he didn’t mourn it; he looked at his analytics.

The analytics said something obvious in retrospect: his art tutorial videos were outperforming everything else. People were going online to learn how to draw and finding, in his words, “loud music and voice-overs or slow and boring” lessons. So in 2012 he launched a new channel — Draw with Jazza — with dead-simple production: a webcam, a microphone, minimal editing, and genuine teaching. His first series tackled human anatomy, the subject beginners fear most, and he made it feel like sketching with a funny friend instead of sitting through a lecture.

The pedagogy was the product. Where other tutorials were dry or pretentious, Jazza was kinetic — fast, funny, encouraging, with running commentary that made hours of practice feel like play. He expanded from anatomy into character design, digital painting, and art challenges: drawing with both hands, drawing blindfolded, drawing whatever the chat demanded. The challenges were entertainment, but the tutorials were education, and the mix built an audience that learned by accident while being entertained on purpose.

By October 2025 the channel had passed 6.7 million subscribers and 1.4 billion views — a genuine creative-education institution, and one of the largest art channels on the platform. His videos have been used as art-classroom material around the world, and his freelance-animation pipeline — the thing the tutorials were originally meant to advertise — became almost beside the point. Jazza Studios became a brand.

Then, in August 2019, he did the scariest thing a niche creator can do: he killed the niche. “I know I said it all in the video,” he wrote, “but I feel the need to say again — I feel SO excited about this change.” The “draw with” in the channel name, he explained, had become a creative restriction, something he felt guilty about not abiding by whenever he wanted to sing, sculpt, or try something new. The renamed Jazza channel came with a new mission statement: he gets to make anything he wants, because his audience lifted him to a place where he could.

The anything includes genuinely ambitious work. The Tale Teller, a nine-minute hand-drawn animation, showed the professional animator behind the teacher — the Newgrounds kid grown up. He reviews art products with brutal honesty, experiments with virtual-reality art tools, and treats every new medium like a playground. His satellite channels — Jazza Studios for animation, his music channel for covers and originals, Daily Jazza for vlogs — orbit the main one like a small media company.

The books made it official. Draw with Jazza — Creating Characters: Fun and Easy Guide to Drawing Cartoons and Comics (Impact Books) put his teaching method in print — the webcam curriculum bound and shelved. Between the books, the challenges, and the tutorials, Jazza has arguably taught more people to draw than any art school alive.

The family is creative too. His brother Shad M. Brooks runs the sword-and-fantasy channel Shadiversity, and Jazza has been clear he doesn’t share his brother’s politics — a rare public line drawn by a creator who otherwise keeps the focus on the work. Jazza married Kate Brooks in 2014; they have a son, and the family lives in Moe, Victoria, Australia, where the studio grew out of a garage.

What Jazza proved is that teaching is content. He didn’t chase trends or outrage cycles; he picked up a pencil, pointed a webcam at his desk, and explained what he was doing while people watched. Fourteen years and 1.4 billion views later, the kid from Newgrounds is still doing the same thing — only now he’s allowed to make anything, and he does.

The review videos deserve their own mention. In an era when sponsored art-supply content is often indistinguishable from advertising, Jazza built a reputation for honest product takes — testing markers, tablets, and gadgets on camera and saying what actually works. Artists trust him because he’d rather lose a sponsorship than his credibility, and the brands know it too.

The “make anything” era has delivered. Virtual-reality sculpting, traditional sculpture, music production, animation experiments — the channel now plays like a public sketchbook of a restless creative mind. Some uploads are art, some are barely art-adjacent, and that’s the mission statement working as intended. The audience that came for drawing tutorials stayed for the curiosity, because curiosity was always the real subject.

The influence runs deeper than the subscriber count. Jazza helped invent the modern art-challenge genre on YouTube — the format every art channel now copies — and proved that teaching could be entertainment without dumbing down the lesson. A generation of digital artists learned anatomy from a webcam in Moe, Victoria. The garage studio worked.