How 123 Hand-Drawn Chickens Became a Gallery Installation

Behind the scenes of All Cooped Up: 2,829 drawn shapes, custom animation software, and a seamless 80-second loop.

Dylan Yarter · September 21, 2026

When you stand in front of All Cooped Up at the Alexander Gallery in Fayetteville, AR later this month, you’re looking at 123 chickens and 205 eyes staring straight back at you.

From a distance, a flock of chickens looks like a mass of identical birds. But stand there long enough, and individual personalities start to emerge. That gap between the crowd and the individual is what this piece is all about.

To show how a sketch scales up to a 12-week physical exhibition, I put together a quick video breakdown showing the process used to go from drawing to the final installation.

Watch the full process breakdown video here 👇

23 Shapes Per Chicken

Every chicken in the piece was hand-illustrated in Procreate, one shape at a time. A single bird isn’t just one flat image, it’s 23 distinct drawn components:

Tail, torso, and neck
Wings and legs
Comb, beak, and eyes

Multiply that across the entire flock, and you’re looking at over 2,800 hand-drawn layers working together on screen to create a single, seamless composition.

Software as the Rigging Medium

Drawing 123 chickens is one thing; making them move without losing the raw feel of hand-drawn art is another.

Rather than animating each frame by hand in traditional software, I engineered custom software with AI as my co-pilot to establish a reusable, expandable program for building crowds of individual chickens. The software reads a master file that assigns each bird its exact spot in the piece, palette color, depth layer, and motion clip.

One Set of Drawings, Three Places to Find Them

The BIZARRE part about building custom studio tools is that the artwork doesn’t live in a single format. The exact same hand-drawn chicken rig powering the gallery piece is also utilized into two other projects:

The Game: You can play All Cooped Up: The Game right in your browser for free (takes 30 seconds, no install needed).
The BizarreBeasts Animated Series: This chicken rig is featured in a completed scene for the upcoming BizarreBeasts animated series on DCP+.