While I tend to think of Reddit as a confusing sea of trolls and lazy spellers, sometimes the social network platform’s users can be seriously funny and creative.

This particular thread started when someone’s mom took a beginners’ art class and painted an egret. She didn’t think it was very good, so her son posted it on Reddit so she could hear praise from someone besides him. The resulting thread is a little like the Matrix, but it’s fantastically fun and funny. I hope you get as big a kick out of it as I did. (I’ll bet the original painter is pretty jazzed about it, too!)

I included just a few of the responses, but there are many more. Here’s the “family tree” of art created from the thread.