26 April 2011 Last updated at 11:44

In pictures: Tweet modern

Portraits of Chris and Nick, and first Irkafirka post

When Chris Bell told his old school friend Nick Hilditch to “stop whinging about your life and do some illustrating”, he looked to Twitter for inspiration. He saw a post from @Sylphiel, and decided to get out the crayons and offer his own unique re-tweet.

Nick has been illustrating tweets for 392 days (and counting). It is a tough schedule: one a day, every day. Chris posts the pictures up on the blog, irkafirka.com.

Chris and Nick spend up to an hour discussing which tweet will get their treatment. “We used to do it by searching keywords,” said Chris. “Just odd words, unusual words. The hardest part is finding the tweet – doing the picture is the easy bit.”

“You know when you see something that you can draw,” explained Nick. “If I see something and get a visual that would be fun to draw, then I’ll do it.”

“For me the important thing is that it is fun, and I know that if I have fun doing it the end product will probably be fun for the audience as well.”

“I like doing animals. I like silly puns. I quite like wilful misinterpretation – where I draw something completely different to what the person was tweeting about. They’re hard to find, you just stumble across them.”

Nick, who works as a freelance illustrator, spends up to an hour working on each drawing, and always gets the picture up and sent to the tweeter within 24 hours of their original post.

The pair work to several rules: strictly one drawing per Twitter user, and suggestions for which tweets to draw are “almost certainly ignored". Most importantly, if they stop enjoying it, they’ll stop.

“Generally the reaction has been positive,” said Chris. The pair won a Golden Twit award last year for Best Pictures, and managed to raise over £1000 for Comic Relief. They were also commissioned to draw tweets from the Nokia World event.

Nick and Chris are seeking a publisher for their work. “It’s like a grown up child still living at home. We’re very fond of it, but it needs to earn its way a little bit. We’ve had some polite rejection letters," said Nick.

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In pictures: Tweet modern

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