Chicken Day Jumper

11 April 2026

We have an eccentric family tradition, known as “Chicken Day”. To really do justice to explaining the event is beyond the scope of this article. However, you should know the key points before we continue:

• Weekend closest to PG’s birthday
• Gather to eat chicken
• Origin story involves massive accidental over-purchase of chicken
• Helen makes annual invitations
• Invitations have become progressively more unhinged
• Spelling and grammar confusion is part of the theme
• It is forbidden to spell chikcne correctly.

This year I wanted to do something special and I’d had a Chicken Day sweatshirt in mind for a while now.

I did some art for this. I’m writing about it because I enjoyed it, my process was new/unusual, and I try to write about projects here whether or not they’re code.

I used AI on this art and it made me ask myself some questions about authorship.

Here is the finished design:

(See full size with transparent background)

Concept

I knew I wanted:

• Giant chiclen gazing proudly into the sky
• Simple consistent colours with splashes of highlights
• Dancing roast chickens
• Lots of text and fonts

Giant Proud Chicken

I wanted a sports-style boldness for the chicken motif. I searched for and found one with the right weights and feeling.

I added annotation lines to the image to show modifications I’d like and fed this to ChatGPT:

Work with the attached chicken logo image and make the following changes:

1. Make the face point up following the pink beak and direction arrow
2. Fill out the green neck line
3. Soften the expression of the chicken to be less serious

This gave me some really suitable output:

I then undertook to completely redraw this myself in Inkscape by tracing it and simplifying the linework where there were too many colours or it was otherwise fussy.

The neck feathers were a problem because they were too pointy and aggressive. I also wanted the chicken to appear as though it were looking across itself, or looking back over it’s shoulder (chickens don’t have shoulders afaik).

I found another suitable image with more fluffy, rounded feathers, traced that, and then painstakingly reconciled the two vectors together:

That’s how the proud chicken came to be. Who created this art? Contributors include the original sports logo illustrator(s) who made the serious chicken and the fluffy chicken. One was entirely redrawn by GPT and then redrawn and coloured by me. The latter was partially-reused and redrawn by me. Then I merged and modified the two. I couldn’t draw this from scratch, but the resultant vector is completely unique to me… so I feel it is mine.

Dancing chickens

I had the dynamics of this in mind, with a chicken pose for each word of “NO MORE THAN 8 CHICKENS PER PERSON” which is a Chrcken Day meme of sorts.

It plays in my head a bit like “Sassy ASCII Dancer”

(•_•)
<) )╯ MAXIMUM
 / \

\(•_•)
 ( (> EIGHT
 / \
 
(•_•)
<) )> CHICKENS
 / \

So I asked ChatGPT

Generate an image of 8 dancing roast chickens. The roast chickens should each be “standing” in a different pose, mid shot of a dance routine. They are headless, skinless, featherless, roasted brown, with leg bones reaching the ground but having no feet. They should be in a simple emoji style, like coloured icons. There should be whitespace separating each chicken. No background or border. It should be a wide image with small height, like a footer.

This didn’t go as well as my other request. It didn’t know what to do with this.

There are so many problems with these 5-and-a-bit nightmare fowl, like the bits that don’t belong on chickens, the floating blobs of meat, the impossible poses, and their generally unappealing orange pallor. But the dance poses themselves have some character!

I then remembered the Skype dancing chicken GIF, and that this was basically half of what I was imagining:

My answer was to import the pixelated Skype GIF into Inkscape, trace it, and cartoonify it (based on the Windows 10 Chicken Drumstick emoji):

I could then clone and modify the poses to use some of those that GPT gave me, taking some license over where chicken thighs begin and end…

Astute observers will see that there are 7 chilken, but I think this itself contributes to the joke.

The question arises again of who made this art. I guess MS own the GIF and the Emoji. But my output doesn’t have a lot in common with either of those as everything has been redrawn, recoloured, stretched, and adapted.

Wrapping up

I don’t have a good in-use photo of the sweatshirt but my five year old took this while I was wearing a coat and it’s all I’ve got.

I could say a lot more about the body text but not today.

Thank you for joining me for this discussion of art provenance and chiiken.

Enjoy to celebrate with likeminded beings. 🎁🐔