This video was originally released on the 3rd of February 2024, it was added to the website on the 8th of April 2025.

Most of this article is copied from the original script of the video with some slight rewordings for a written format, but there are some piece to camera segments with new narration that were filmed after it was written, as Sycra’s channel was restored during production, these segments are marked out with dividers and have been included for context.

Introduction

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Have you ever thought about who you owe your mindset, work or ideas to? It may be a bit of a corny question, but really think about it! Who was the person in your life who kickstarted that domino effect of influence that eventually led you to create the things you create? If you are a writer, that person may be Harlan Ellison, or if you are in love with game programming it might be a person such as Jonathan Blow, but for me, someone who does many creative things all at once, that person that pushed that first domino was Sycra Yasin. 

Who is Sycra Yasin?

Who is Sycra Yasin?

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Sycra is an artist, and in a way he can be described as a pioneer for art YouTube. He has been creating tutorials, speedpaints and sometimes sketchbook tours on his channel since 2006; Long before the days of monetisation, Patreon and an increasingly corporate Web 2.0. Sycra has been providing free education centred around painting and drawing without an incentive to earn anything from it.

Eventually he created a Patreon which provides subscribers with an exclusive Discord server and with higher tiers providing paint-overs and one on one coaching, a service for the more dedicated, the ones really willing to become professional artists.

His previous works range from realistically rendered caricatures all the way up to ultra stylized cartoon characters with dangerously pointed chins, and that did not come out of nowhere, but rather years of hard work and dedication to his art. 

I am sure many would consider Sycra’s YouTube channel as a pillar in the art community, with dozens of hours worth of footage teaching viewers how to draw, but without forcing them to follow some kind of template. His channel also isn’t necessarily centred around how to draw a specific body part or style, but rather proposes novel ideas in regards to workflow and how to approach the process of learning to become an artist. An attitude that is often promoted by Sycra and artists around him, is  the importance of “mileage”; No they weren’t talking about Toyota Priuses, but rather putting in the hours practising the craft by drawing subjects over and over and over again. Once you draw something dozens of times, muscle memory builds up, which results in less mental resources being spent on drawing that thing again in the future. If you drew an ear and were happy with the result, the time is ripe to just draw it again. 

Of the many artists on YouTube Sycra also might be one of the bravest. He set a precedent for many aspiring artists to share information between each other and not just drawing techniques mind you; Sketchbooks, the struggle of becoming an artist and even his story, which is one of a troubled upbringing and battles with mental illness. He also didn’t shy away from being vulnerable, sharing his previously directionless approach to art, not knowing what goal he was building his skills up to, making crucial portfolio mistakes or admitting that he was a late starter in art, showcasing a slow but steady improvement in his ability.

Frankly, this takes balls! And I hope that Sycra knows how much of an inspiration he is to many directionless teens out there. He certainly was and still is to me!   

How I got to know Sycra and my road to Video

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But what do I have to do with Sycra? If you have been watching my videos for a while, you haven’t seen any speedpaints or art videos at all, only videos about games and the occasional real world issue. Before video, I was more interested in becoming a professional artist!

This is Mark Crilley’s Mastering Manga book! It might be the first art related book I ever bought. Before I found Sycras channel I was engrossed by Mark Crilley’s videos that teach the viewer how to draw Manga. He is a comic illustrator and YouTuber since 2007, who similarly to Sycra uploaded free videos that taught art. Eventually I stumbled across one of Sycra’s videos, likely a how to draw video, and was surprised by multiple different things. The videos were longer, and went in depth with more advanced concepts and ideas. Frankly I likely didn’t understand many of the things he said at the time, but I was hooked! I also noticed that he drew digitally in most of his videos, which prompted me to beg my parents to buy me a bamboo tablet, which I still use to this day!

Since this discovery of Sycras channel, I went deeper down a rabbit hole which ended up with creative work being really the only thing I want to do for the rest of my life. I wasn’t a good student in school and would rather sketch and doodle during class. Eventually I decided that I want to do art professionally so I went to a school that focussed on media creation so to speak. Around that time I also started posting in the now seemingly defunct Sycra forum and I really miss those days. I found many other interesting artists on the forum, and some people were happy to see me update my online sketchbook, even though my drawings were far cruder than theirs! Someone created an unofficial Discord for forum members and I decided to join, getting to know many more people who had to put up with my edgy teenage self. 

Over the years I created some finished pieces but mostly sketched around really, and I learned just how valuable criticism and the experience of others truly is!

When painting this guy for instance, “Sharkboy” I called him, a professional artist named “NesoKaiyoh” pointed out various issues with the painting, suggesting I make some anatomical changes to the creature and pointing out that the image had a horrible dynamic range and that I should darken the darks and lighten the lights more. I applied this criticism to the best of my ability and there we go, a painting I couldn’t have made without that help! 

The Discord was a source of inspiration too, with many great artists sharing their creations on an almost daily basis! Kozlik with his multi breasted, colourful aliens, Steeliebobs delightful angular sketches, Neso’s Angels, Greg’s Furry creations, Telepurtes animations which you definitely have seen before; There was little in the way of getting inspired!

But for me, drawing and painting moved more and more into the background of my creative aspirations. I started making more videos and focussed on writing my scripts and turning them into something through editing, but in the end I always circle around various creative disciplines, because really; Art is inbred! To make my videos better I have to create assets, which could be photos, videos, vector illustrations, and could also be drawings! I also noticed that over the years that cross influence between disciplines is a real thing, you can improve in drawing through taking photos or getting into Visual Effects; May sound stupid, but in reality you learn a lot about composition and what your tools are capable of if you just experiment around and put in that mileage into whatever you love doing. 

I love my experiments and my videos and I am indebted to the people who put me on that path! I would encourage you to check out many of Sycras videos to maybe get inspired or learn something new, however, his channel sadly was taken down permanently.

The Crypto Scam and Sinix Design’s video on the matter

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You might be wondering what Sycra did to lose his channel. The answer is… nothing. What happened was that he was the target of a crypto scammer hijacking his channel and YouTube not caring to reinstate it. Yeah, seriously! 

Some weeks ago, I got a notification on YouTube. MicroStrategy is streaming about some bitcoin crap. I was surprised since I don’t subscribe to any cryptocurrency channels and am generally not interested in such topics. 

But I realised that something was wrong. The channel had around 700 thousand subscribers, no videos were uploaded and the only content on the channel was this single livestream. After a while I put one and two together and figured out that the channel belonged to Sycra. Saddened to see this, I wrote a report explaining that the channel was hijacked and sent it off, hoping for the best. 

Sycra made sure to warn his followers and has been updating everyone over Twitter, sadly without YouTube reinstating the channel then and there. 

If you get notified about new videos on my YouTube channel, it's not me. Someone's hacked into my Gmail and has taken over the Sycra channel. Turned it into some microstrategy thing. Don't click on any of their stuff, please.

— Sycra Yasin (@Sycra) January 14, 2024

I think one of the most infuriating parts about this entire story is just how impotent and inept YouTube Support and in general the process of getting help on YouTube actually is.

So, you would think as a creator you can just write an email to someone or there’s some internal tool, anything, some kind of helpline that can help you verify that you are the person that has the channel, is uploading the content, that is doing the things.

In reality what you have to do is you have to go on fucking Twitter and bitch all day until there is enough of a stink being caused for YouTube to notice and care. That is what YouTube support is for these cases, you basically go on Twitter, a completely different platform, and you spam as much as possible “Hey guys! Hello? I have a problem!” and at some point YouTube will hopefully recognise you.

A while later Sinix Design, a friend of Sycra and another gigantic personal inspiration of mine who I got to know from Sycra’s channel, uploaded a video about how YouTube treats this legendary creator in the art realm. 

How the hijackers got hold of his channel was through exploiting his SMS two factor authentication method by spoofing his phone number. 

Sycra did not get the privilege to speak to anyone, instead only receiving automated messages, and his channel cannot get reinstated due to a trademark strike. MicroStrategy is a real company after all and must have reported the channel after finding out about the scam themselves,  which leaves the victim of the Hijack, Sycra, in a predicament. 

Another thing is that YouTube puts little effort in helping the people that are less valuable to them. With Sycra being an infrequent uploader, not having over a million subscribers and not making YouTube much money, he gets treated less favourably, which is not only disappointing but also majorly concerning. 

And the biggest knock on effect from all of this, is that dozens of hours worth of free education are gone now, lost thanks to selfish scammers who likely pulled hijacks such as these many times before. Or rather, they would be if someone didn’t think of backing up Sycras content years ago…  

Not completely lost Media! 

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This is where I go to now to watch old uploads from Sycra, the Sycra Backup channel, which was created some years ago in order to archive all of Sycras videos at the time. Back then the threat to the channel were copyright strikes, of which it takes 3 for someone to get their channel shut down, and luckily this backup exists in the case that the channel is not reinstated.

While I downloaded all of the channel’s contents for safekeeping it did make me think about how unjust this situation really is and how insecure our creations really are on this platform. When an original YouTuber with a library going all the way back to 2006 cannot save his channel in time, how would the situation look for a far less popular person? This also is yet another way of potentially losing everything one built up over time, due to no fault of their own.

One of the main issues when it comes to dealing with YouTube or just the YouTube related issues if they may arise is that the help is very impotent, ironically it’s very unhelpful, it’s void of context and it’s very hard to get a real person on board, and if you get a real person on board most of the times the help isn’t really going anywhere.

On my channel we had multiple run ins with YouTube’s shit automation and frankly inhuman approach to rule enforcement and community support. Videos of mine have been wrongfully flagged with containing hate speech before¹, and the last big upload, the first part to a four part documentary, was algorithmically killed due to a copyright claim that I disputed but wasn’t resolved for a month². Situations like these really make me feel insecure and they send a clear message to me; I am not welcome.

Many of us would be better off if we had our own website instead of relying on the corporate overlords above us. But this is where they get us! How do people find out about you when you are not on YouTube? You may have to censor yourself, sanitise your videos in order for ads to play and potentially even compromise on your principles to keep making stuff and be heard… but for what? For YouTube to not even piss on you when you are set ablaze? 

Closing words?

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But well, what can one do?

The fear that I have, that Sycra has, that a lot of other channels have is that their channels get terminated, and Sycra’s channel was on the brink of termination years ago and now it was on the brink again, only that finally someone at YouTube actually heard him out.

But this is the thing, what if the outcry, the public bitching and screaming on Twitter, what if it didn’t reach the ears, the correct ears, at YouTube? This is why there should be some system in place that can prevent a channel deletion like this to happen in the future, some kind of anti-fraud anti-scam system. Maybe one may be in place but again, if you have to bitch on Twitter for 15 days to get some kind of progress done, that isn’t good. That really isn’t good.

But yeah I’m happy to end this article on a positive note. Which, originally it didn’t. I had to rewrite quite a bit of the article, like not too much, like certain things here or there, I still want to get a message across of inspiration and how something that you love can go away and, there is a threat of something being gone forever.

And so I thought that it’s still valuable to have an article like this in place just to show, like, the domino effect of influence, how one channel even if it’s defunct or abandoned or uploads infrequently, how one source can influence many many people.

And I would direct some of you viewers out there, especially the artistically minded to check out some of Sycras videos. My recommendations are:

The struggle to improve in Art and The Struggle Continues, Sycra explores older art of his and ruminates on his difficulties and milestones in his art journey. In the sequel he sits down with Bob Meat Bag and they discuss their journeys in a 3 hour long sit down. Much value to get from there!

Today I watched the interview Sycra did with Sinix. A tremendous video which gives an insight into another artist I adore! His interviews in general are highly recommended, especially if he happened to talk to an artist you like already.

And Last but not Least, I highly recommend to anyone, wanna be artist or not, to check out the three part series “To Become an Artist”³. I think if there is anything to watch on this channel, it is that series.

I am really happy to see that Sycra is back to the living so to speak, and I hope that we are gonna see many more videos from him in the future. And whatever it may be I just know it might be a really interesting watch! So, thank you very much Sycra if you’re reading this for the many years that you gave me inspiration to, for pushing me into the world of art, into the world of creativity, and I really hope that you don’t have to go through such an experience again… It didn’t look like it was fun. Thank you guys for reading.

Footnotes

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