What Countryhumans Actually Is
Countryhumans is an internet fan art series where sovereign states are reimagined as small, chibi-style people wearing clothes patterned after their national flag. The USSR version depicts the Soviet Union as a figure in red with a hammer and sickle motif, usually drawn with the typical oversized head and simplified body proportions the style demands. People make them do mundane things like drink tea or stand in line, which somehow makes a political entity from the 20th century look absurdly harmless. I started drawing USSR Countryhumans around 2019 because a bunch of people on DeviantArt were making them and the comment sections were just people asking for more. It's not historical education dressed up in pastel colors. It's a specific artistic choice where you take geopolitical symbols and reduce them to something small and non-threatening. The appeal is pretty straightforward: people want to engage with history without the heavy lifting, and cute art removes any tension the subject matter might carry. The process is simple enough. You pick a reference image of the flag, simplify the color palette down to three or four main colors, draw a basic stick-figure-adjacent body, and then dress it in flag-patterned clothing. For USSR specifically, that means red as the dominant color, the yellow hammer and sickle placed somewhere visible, and maybe a ushanka hat if you're going for the stereotypical winter vibe. The hammer and sickle is the hardest part to get right because it needs to stay recognizable while being small enough to fit on a torso or chest area.
I ran into a real problem early on with proportions. Every time I tried to make the USSR figure look appropriately tall and imposing to match the historical weight, it broke the Countryhumans style entirely. The whole aesthetic relies on those shortened limbs and big heads. My workaround was to keep the proportions correct for the style but use posture and composition to convey authority instead. Having the figure stand perfectly straight with arms crossed at the chest and other characters in the background looking slightly smaller achieved the effect without violating the art style rules. There is a genuine artistic tension here that most people don't think about. You are taking a state that was responsible for tens of millions of deaths and rendering it in an art style designed to make you feel warm and fuzzy. Some artists lean into the dissonance deliberately, creating images that feel subtly wrong beneath the cuteness. Others avoid it entirely and just make harmless daily life scenes. Both approaches exist and both have dedicated audiences, though the latter dominates on platforms like Twitter and TikTok. If you want to start making your own, the software you use matters less than understanding the style constraints. Procreate on iPad works fine. Clip Studio Paint is what most of the serious artists use. Even MS Paint can produce acceptable results if you understand the geometry. The key insight nobody mentions is that shading barely matters in this style. Flat colors with a single darker tone for shadows keeps things looking clean. Adding complex gradients or cel-shading just makes the image look like you forgot what Countryhumans is supposed to look like.
Finding reference material is where people get stuck. The flag pattern needs to wrap correctly around a cylindrical or rectangular body shape. I found that taking screenshots of actual flag fabric draped over objects gives you a better sense of how the pattern distorts than any tutorial shows. For USSR specifically, the hammer and sickle orientation is non-negotiable if you want other fans to accept your drawing. It must face forward or at most be slightly rotated, never mirrored. I wasted three weeks getting called out for having a backward sickle before someone pointed it out in a Discord server. The community around this content is fairly contained. Main hubs are DeviantArt, Twitter, TikTok, and a few smaller forums. The age demographic skews young, which explains why the content tends toward slice-of-life scenarios rather than anything politically engaged. You will find USSR Countryhumans sharing bento boxes with its neighboring Countryhumans far more often than you will find anything addressing actual Soviet history. That is not a criticism, it is just the reality of what the format produces. One thing that trips up beginners is the color accuracy. The Soviet flag red is not the same as the Chinese flag red or the Cuban flag red. If you are making a piece with multiple Communist-era Countryhumans, the shade differences matter to people who notice these things. I use hex code #CC0000 as my baseline for USSR red and adjust from there depending on lighting conditions in the piece. Digital artists sometimes skip this detail and just slap the same red on everything, which makes the artwork look lazy to anyone who actually knows the flags.
Get the Full Details
There are download resources if you want to skip drawing from scratch. Various Countryhumans template sheets circulate on Reddit and DeviantArt where you can trace over basic body outlines. These are useful for practice but overusing them creates derivative work that does not improve your skills. I kept returning to the same template for months because it was comfortable, and my drawings stayed mediocre the entire time. Switching to blank canvas after that point forced me to figure out proportions myself and improved my work noticeably within a few weeks. The format has real limitations as an educational tool. You cannot learn about the Stalin era, the Great Purge, or Soviet economic policy from Countryhumans content. The style actively prevents that because the entire visual language is built around removability of threat. A cute USSR character drinking milk will never make you uncomfortable, and that is precisely why the content stays harmless. Some people find that disturbing. Others find it charming. Both reactions are valid. If your goal is to create USSR Countryhumans art, the path is straightforward and the community is generally welcoming to newcomers. Post your work, accept the feedback, and stop worrying about whether you are representing the history accurately. The format was never designed for that. It was designed for people to feel something soft when looking at something that would normally make them feel heavy. That contradiction is the whole point.
