With iPhone and Stickers, a Doodling Artist That Dreams Big

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“The eraser is a godsend,” said Jon Burgerman, pointing an iPhone in the direction of a compact, raggedy-haired dog outside a Blue Bottle Coffee shop in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. He recorded a four-second video of the canine sniffing the sidewalk and then quickly used his finger to sketch a hot dog with wide eyes, a gaping mouth and hands and feet, using the eraser feature to make the lines crisper. The press of a button and the scene went up on Instagram, where Mr. Burgerman, a self-deprecating British artist with a penchant for bright colors and googly eyes, has nearly 64,000 followers.

Mr. Burgerman’s primary technique is to overlay doodles onto scenes of everyday life in New York, adding a stylized bird into the lap of a distracted subway rider, say, or sketching a quick pair of faces onto a bunch of bananas hanging off a vendor’s cart. “Once your eyes open to this kind of thing, you see it everywhere,” he said. The stories have become so popular that the Tate Modern featured them in an exhibition last year.

“There is a pleasure in using unsophisticated equipment,” said Mr. Burgerman, 37. But he is hardly an online naïf. In an attention-getting 2015 series called “Jon’s Famous Friends,” he juxtaposed clipped images of himself and celebrities side by side. In one, you see Mr. Burgerman on his couch, smiling at Taylor Swift, who is seated on a bench and gazing in his direction. In another, he pats the rippled torso of a young, shirtless and pantless Arnold Schwarzenegger. In a third, he applies lipstick to an open-mouthed Kim Kardashian West. “I wanted to show that if you put one image next to another, you can alter the reading,” he said.

Mr. Burgerman said he believes art can happen anywhere, at anytime, using anything, a concept he shares in the book “It’s Great to Create,” released Tuesday, using past projects to show amateur artists how to unlock their creativity.

Some suggestions: Paint your own clothes, the way Mr. Burgerman regularly does for friends; place something silly inside a clear box, like when he sold miniature, Play-Doh versions of Jeff Koons’s massive aluminum Play-Doh sculpture outside of the Whitney Museum; or grab a friend or new acquaintance and draw each other’s portraits in 60 seconds. (This one Mr. Burgerman has been doing for years.)

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