Wet Paint and Microfame

Bekah Legault may seem like any other college first-year who’s adjusting from  high school and embracing her newfound independence. However, she isn’t like most students in her online life. 

Legault, a marketing student at Miami University, has gone viral on the video-sharing platform TikTok. Her account @rebekah.legault has 1.2 million followers and nearly 30 million views on her videos. 

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TikTok is a social media platform where users can film videos and post them for anyone to view. It differs from other video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube, because the videos are shorter, with durations ranging from 15 seconds to three minutes.

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She went viral on the platform for her captivating yet seemingly effortless painting videos, where she creates anything from succulents to koi fish in space. Once, she even painted a whole canvas filled with frogs.

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Legault feels most at peace when she paints. Picking up her paintbrush and transforming a blank canvas into a piece of art gives her an outlet to express herself, which she said her creative brain needs to function. She likes painting portraits of her friends and her favorite cartoon characters. 

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Legault remembers the first time she appeared in a TikTok video. Her friend filmed a video of them harmonizing together, and they posted it to the friend’s account. A few hours later, the video had nearly 7,000 views. 

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“I will never forget how much I loved that feeling, the feeling of knowing people were seeing and enjoying that first video,” Legault said. “After that, I wanted to make more and more videos. I wanted to have that feeling again.”

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The taste of microfame from that video convinced Legault to start a TikTok account of her own in the summer of 2019.  

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She started posting multiple painting videos a week during her first months on TikTok and began to gain a small following of a few thousand people. Her page increased in engagement when she started taking painting requests from her followers. 

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Her first viral TikTok came from a request a follower made. They asked her to paint Disney Princesses, but before she even began creating the characters on the giant canvas, she decided to announce the series by painting its title. She crafted the words “Disney Princess” in the typical Disney font at the top of the canvas and posted it before going to bed. When she woke up the following day, the video had over 1 million views. 

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“[When I found out] I screamed downstairs and told my parents, called my best friend and was just totally freaking out,” Legault said.

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She had no idea why that particular video was her first one to go viral, but she felt lucky that out of the millions of videos posted on the app that day, her video was seen by so many. 

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After that, her following on TikTok continued to grow. She hit 1 million followers in under a year of being on the platform and started to experience a kind of attention she had never had before.

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“People I didn’t even know would bring it up in class,” Legault said. “One time, this guy I never spoke to before stands up in front of the whole class and goes, ‘Guys, did you know that Bekah is TikTok famous?’” 

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Legault said she is not bothered by the attention she gets for her TikToks. She embraces talking about her viral experiences with those who ask, but she is conscious not to talk about it constantly so she doesn’t come off as braggy or annoying to others. 

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“It feels silly to admit, but I love talking about it,” Legault said. “I just don’t want to force other people to talk about it if they don’t want to.” 

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Frances Cors, a first-year marketing major at Miami, is Legault’s best friend and roommate. She said that Legault’s large TikTok following played no part in forming their friendship. Instead, she was drawn to Legault because of her confident and outgoing personality.

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Cors didn’t have a TikTok account when she met Legault in person to discuss being roommates after meeting through Instagram. However, when she found out about Legault’s account, she was shocked to see Legault had such a large following. 

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“I downloaded it after just to watch her videos,” Cors said. “There’s this one video that has something like 20 million views, and I thought that was so crazy, but her paintings are so good. She totally deserves that many views.”

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Since she began attending college, it has been a struggle for Legault to find a balance between her online and offline life. 

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“Sometimes I do have to prioritize my school work and hanging out with friends over making videos,” Legault said. “I always try to find time to make videos each week, even if it’s not my typical painting videos.”

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Allocating her time at college has helped Legault avoid losing the passion she has found for making videos. If she doesn’t feel like posting a video, she simply won’t post. Legault said that setting these boundaries with TikTok has been very beneficial. She admits social media can be super fun, but it has dark sides. 

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“Social media is definitely a slippery slope,” Legault said. “It allows people to connect with those who have similar interests, but on the flip side, social media also causes so much self-comparison that can cause many people to create false assumptions about how they are supposed to look or act.”

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Luckily, in Legault’s case, she has not experienced many hate comments or negative people on her account. In fact, her experience on the platform has been quite the opposite.

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“I have had a pretty positive experience on TikTok,” she said. “In social settings, I tend to care a lot about whether people like me or not, but on my TikTok, it’s entirely my space…I have followers that love me for me and what I post.”

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Legault’s experience going viral on social media has made her interested in making videos as a full-time career in the future. She has made approximately $5,000 from her TikTok videos, and she hopes to earn more on the platform going forward. 

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“If I could just paint all day and make videos about it, that would be the dream,” she said. 

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While Legault has several years to think about her career, right now she is just trying to make the most out of her semi-typical college life while sharing it all with her millions of internet friends. 

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