How Tubby Nugget went from silly doodle to viral sensation with 10 million fans

The pair met in 2015 when the then filmmakers were assigned to work on a short film called Heartsick. Today, they are still creating things together – only now, their canvas has shifted from screen to page, and their latest protagonist is a round, brown, squishy little character.

“A year into dating, Jenine would always call me a nugget,” Jackson recalls with a laugh. “So what I would do is draw little nuggets on my phone and send them to her whenever she needed to be picked up, or she was having a bad day.”

The real catalyst for shifting their focus solely onto Tubby Nugget was a health crisis back in 2018, when Pastores found herself in and out of the hospital with increasing frequency. At first, the doctors were not sure what they were dealing with.