A couple of weeks ago Poppy chuckled at something on her computer and said, ‘You should get Jim’ll Paint It to do one of your tics.’ I hadn’t heard of Jim’ll Paint It so she showed me his Facebook page, and I was blown away.

For anyone who hasn’t yet discovered this brilliantly funny page here’s a bit about it:

There’s an amazing artist called Jim who can make your wildest dreams a reality, using nothing but Microsoft Paint. People are invited to suggest topics and he paints them, no matter how specific or surreal they are.

Poppy and I looked through some of the most recent images and they’re all excellent. Pops said he’d recently had weeks where he imposed particular rules on what people could suggest, like ‘No celebrity week’ or ‘No more than five words week.’ She thought he might like the randomness of my tics and I hoped so too, so I got in touch and sent him a link to all my tics.

Jim responded quickly and I was really pleased he liked the site and was up for drawing some tics. He explained that one of the things that really appealed to him about the tics was that they were funny and surreal without being contrived or self-conscious.

I was really curious to see which one he’d choose and I was surprised and delighted when this amazing picture arrived in my inbox.

“I’ve got limbs, they’re multiplying.”

I found it particularly pleasing because one of my main aims is to share the creativity and humour of Tourettes by making the tics available to artists to respond to. The whole idea is that it’d be wasteful not do something creative with my tics – the strange products of my unusual neurology.

Jim explained how the image had come about on his page and the result was fantastic. What struck me was that none of the 174 comments on the picture made any reference to swearing – this is very unusual for any Facebook post that mentions Tourettes. This just goes to show the positive role creativity can play in overturning assumptions and stereotypes about the condition.

I’m hoping there’ll be more tic-inspired paintings by Jim in the future. In the meantime the plan is to add prints of this image to the Touretteshero shop very soon.

While you wait, why not get drawing yourself and upload your creation to the gallery? There’re only four more days until I need to pick another image of the week – could it be yours?