allows me to have fun making content that will make people smile. And that makes me happy, too. I’m always thinking of ways to help my Snapchat homies have the best day ever.
- Shaun
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Cyrene and I met through Snapchat, which is awesome, and we started snapping back and forth sharing unique ideas and creative content!! Eventually we met in person, where I was able to see beyond her incredible Snapchats and could see her as the incredibly nice and very smart person she is. We talked business, family, and fun, only to find we were very similar in every category. From that point on we have remained the best of friends and oftentimes see each other at big events or on branded Snapchat campaigns. Definitely BFFs for life!
Her art completely removes you from reality; it tells an entire story! Whether you are side by side with Ele on some art-splashed adventure or side by side with Cyrene as she travels to a fun event, the art grabs you and keeps you in the story. I love how she oftentimes will completely fill the entire phone screen with art! Her style is a favorite among all Snapchat users.
Meeting CyreneQ
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Snapchatters like Cyrene and I make content that is unique to the platform, and it has allowed us to connect with our fans on a special level. We receive snaps all the time from our snap homies about how excited they are about the adventures we create. You just can’t find this level of engagement on any other platform, and I love being a part of making someone’s day better. If you smile or laugh when you see my doodles and adventures on Snapchat, then I know I’m doing something right.
11 Seconds to Success
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My name is Cyrene, known across all social media as CyreneQ. I never would have expected that downloading a messaging app would create so many opportunities for me. Who would have predicted even in their wildest dreams that sending one picture message would eventually lead to brands inviting me to red carpet events, VIP backstage access to film premieres and exhibits before the public saw them, appearances on national TV and coverage in top publications, being flown on awesome vacations with my family, and even a book of my own – who knew?
Some may call this luck, and it may be, but I know I’ve worked hard to prepare the puzzle pieces so they could fall into place when the time was right.
It all started with a dream; a desire to live my own dream, not someone else’s. Everyone always told me to find a stable job that I could stay for years and then retire. Get a 401k, a good salary, work for a nice boss – things like that. Right out of college, I found
Introduction
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a salary job as a graphic designer for a cosmetic company. I liked it, but something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t feeling fulfilled. I thought it was about money, so I started looking for a higher paying job. Luckily, I remembered I had a job offer in my junior year in college from a large telecom company. At the time I couldn’t take on a full-time job because I wanted to finish college and get my degree. I looked for the old email and asked them if there were still job openings – and there were! I got in at the right time, the beginning of their very first in-house design team. I had the opportunity to see the team grow and expand. It wasn’t long before I found ways to do the work in a couple of hours, and then counted ceiling tiles the rest of the time until 5pm hit. The job
paid great, with awesome benefits - but again, I didn’t feel fulfilled. People said I did a great job,
I won a few awards for projects I worked on, people were great to work with, but I still didn’t feel
satisfied. I often found myself in a daze, asking myself, will I be in this exact same cube 20
years from now? Is this what life’s all about? Will I grow old inside these walls? I’d studied
graphic design in college. This was what I’d hoped for, what I thought I wanted, so why was I
feeling so unfulfilled? This couldn’t be it.
And so I downloaded an app to kill time. Snapchat.
I started following these really talented people on the app. Snapchat is known for its disappearing content, and I was constantly taking screenshots and saving art that I was seeing. I felt it was a waste when they disappeared. I started researching more and more and found there were more people creating awesome art on Snapchat. I followed them and again took screenshots and saved their artwork. I had collected so many works of art, and I thought, what
Chapter 1
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should I do with them? With the artists’ permission, I decided to create a blog called The 11th Second, named after Snapchat’s famous 10-second disappearing posts – if you save them, that means they’ve gone beyond 10 seconds, and you are now giving them their “11th Second.”
I started featuring more and more Snapchat artists. There was one artist who did celebrity drawings, and he inspired me to do celebrity drawings of my own, but I wanted to do something funny. I created a celebrity selfie series, where I would draw a celebrity on my selfie. I’ve always been a celebrity hunter – I love taking pictures with local celebrities and dreamed of taking pictures with more famous people.
So I created a drawing series of celebrities that I wanted to take a selfie with, but knew it would never be possible. But with the magic of Snapchat, anything is possible – perhaps I’d just draw them in!
I didn’t know my posts were going to be a big hit, I just did it for fun. I would spend hours trying to draw celebrity
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Chapter 1
faces, getting as much detail as possible with Snapchat’s limited drawing tools. I started posting them on Instagram, and one news website caught wind of them and decided to feature me. That article gave me my start. I still didn’t think much about it. I was focused on the website. I wanted to keep featuring artists and get to know them and their art in a more in-depth way. Although I made my website, the11thsecond, just for fun, in the back of my mind I could see how I might potentially put ads
on the site and create income from it. I became obsessed with featuring artists and checking out
Snapchat