Scott's simple idea took Twitter by storm

What started as a fun hobby has, in the space of just seven months, grown into an international phenomenon.

Scott Weston's world is filled with black-and-white personified animals, vegetables and other inanimate objects as he creates pictures for celebrities and non-famous Twitter users alike.

A 39-year-old digital agency employee from Bagley Street, Scott started the @DrawnYourTweet account on February 5 after coming up with a simple idea.

He would read other people's tweets, visualise them, and draw what came to his mind before posting them back to the user with the message 'I've drawn your tweet. Enjoy'.

His first drawing, in response to a message from @_isabelos which read 'My cheeks get so red when I'm cold, I look like a tomato', was of a tomato in a scarf. It got seven retweets and 23 favourites.

But now, just 218 tweets later, Scott's account has more than 29,000 followers, and he has been flown over to America to take part in a special Today Show programme.

He also counts celebrities amongst his followers after making them the target of his witty sketches, and one of his drawings for Phillip Schofield hangs on the wall at the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter.

Scott said: "I just kept coming across people's tweets, using it in a professional capacity, but I became interested in what people said in their day-to-day lives.

"Things like needing that first cup of coffee in the morning, or not being able to get out of bed.

"People can be quite witty talking about everyday things, those things interested me more and I started to visualise them in my head.

"People sometimes exaggerate their situations, and I thought they made quite nice visualisations."

Scott started his venture by putting random search terms into the social media site - in the first instance looking for all tweets about tomatoes - before picking his favourite and creating a piece.

"I picked a couple, drew them up, and I wondered what to do with them," he said. "So I decided to give them back to the people that I got them from in the first place.

"I set up the account and tweeted about six or seven that I'd done, and purposely went for people that didn't have a lot of followers.

"The first thing I searched for was 'tomato', so that was the first thing I drew, and I kept up the food theme initially, so the second term I search for was 'egg'.

"One guy said his egg looked like the Death Star from Star Wars, so I drew that too."

The account went relatively unnoticed for a couple of weeks, until Scott decided to draw a tweet from his first high-profile 'target'.

New Statesman journalist Helen Lewis has more than 40,000 followers, and one morning in February she tweeted: "My Sunday morning guilty pleasure is always guessing what the big questions will be. Do octopuses need Jesus?"

After deciding to doodle this particular statement and tweeting the drawing to Ms Lewis, she reposted it for all of her followers to see.

Scott said: "That was the one defining moment where it changed.

"That's probably the most controversial one I've done, and it's probably the one that launched me.

"I drew it, my wife said 'are you sure about that?' but I thought it was quite a positive, happy image.

"Normally I had been tweeting to people with 10 or 20 followers, but Helen Lewis retweeted it.

"Another journalist did an article on it that day, and by the end of the Sunday I went from about 100 followers to about 8,000, which is pretty crazy.

"I was out shopping with my wife and I had to turn off my phone because the notifications were completely draining my battery.

"It was a bit of an odd thing knowing the next tweet I drew was going to thousands of followers. It was quite nerve-racking to go from 100 to 8,000, as suddenly there's an audience waiting for that tweet to come through, so it was quite an interesting transition."

Several months later, as his presence on Twitter grew, Scott was invited to appear on a webcast by The Today Show.

The show's 'Orange Room' it's social media section which is presented by Carson Daily, was celebrating its first anniversary and wanted Scott to go along and draw live.

Scott said: "Out of the blue the producer got in contact with me as she followed Drawn Your Tweet, and asked whether I fancied going out there to do some drawings for NBC.

"I was quite shocked and surprised to be honest.

"Going from February thinking I had quite a nice little idea to keep me amused, something I thought was so small, to giving me the opportunity to go to New York was quite a surprise.

"It's very very surreal to be honest."

Scott has been drawing since he was small, and would create comic strips to pass around his class back in his home village in Codnor, Derbyshire.

His degree at the former Humberside University had an arts and design focus, and although there is no element of drawing in his work he is still in a creative role.

Prior to launching @DrawnYourTweet, Scott said that he would only ever doodle during meetings or on the commute home, and refers to his posts as just that - doodles.

He said: "I call it that because I don't think it's too far removed from when I did my doodling.

"I think it's an accurate description of what they are, because they are just that, doodles of thoughts in my mind."

Scott's account actually follows no other Twitter user, so now to choose the subject of his next drawings he has stopped entering random search terms and has instead created lists of all of his followers. When he has the spare time during lunch, or on his commute or at home, he will trawl through the lists.

Usually the right tweets will jump out at him and he will immediately be able to visualise how it will look, but he does find it more difficult to find the right tweets that to come up with something to draw.

He said: "I will go on my phone and flick through my lists, shortlist four or five that I find interesting, and then go home and decide which ones to draw up.

"I have got 29,000 followers so there's a small chance you will get yours drawn, but it's a thank you in kind for following me that eventually you might get one of your tweets drawn.

"Some I think 'maybe I can work with this', but there are ones that I come across that I know as soon as I get home I can draw it, because I will have it in my head.

"The drawing is the easy bit, it's the finding them that's quite a process to go through, but if I can find five or six in a half-hour train journey that I will be set for a couple of days.

"I always want to look for more because I don't want to miss out, I have the compulsion to look every day.

"I must have missed so many funny ones."

Although Scott says 99 per cent of his drawings are done from messages posted by those who follow his account, celebrities do play a part in his 'work'.

So far he has created drawings for Stephen Fry, singer will.i.am, Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher, comedian Ricky Gervais and radio presenter Lauren Laverne amongst others.

One that he put together following a tweet by Phillip Schofield, which reads 'This is what I love about Twitter, we start off talking about Mr Potato Head's bum and end up discussing our favourite single malts', is now framed and hangs on the wall of the Twitter headquarters in California.

Scott said: "Every now and again celebrities will retweet one or acknowledge it, and they are the ones that will boost the number of followers up.

"Phillip Schofield responded to me when I first did the drawing, I think his is the first celebrity's I did, and he replied to it quite positively.

"But someone in Twitter actually tweeted the fact that they had spotted it and put it up on their wall."

Scott now plans to continue with the account for the foreseeable future, but may consider branching out into other forms of media in the future.

Fellow Twitter and Facebook user, Birmingham-based October Jones, has published two books containing his Texts From Dog idea which he originally launched online.

Scott said: "There's no definite plans in the pipeline but by the nature of what I'm doing, if anything else does come out of it I think it would be a published book, they naturally fit the book format.

"That's one of the first things that people ask me, 'are you going to bring out a book?'

"Apart from that I'll just be carrying on, making sure I'm on top of the tweets that go out and making sure I keep up with the Drawn Your Tweet account."

And out of all of his drawings so far, which one does Scott rate as his favourite? It's one from July, originally tweeted by @haassauce.

"The guy said that he took his dog for a walk and that he smelled the entire universe," Scott said.

"It's quite poetic really to think it's come out of a tweet, a dog smelling the universe.

"It's such a lovely line to come up with, you visualise it in your head straight away, so that has to be my favourite one as of now."

You can take a look at Scott's drawings and keep track of his regular posts, as well as being in with a chance of having a drawing of your very own, by following @DrawnYourTweet.