“I used to claim that all the animals were real, and it took ages to find them and photograph them, although that joke wore thin pretty quickly,” Tom quipped about how long it takes him to finish the pictures.

“The length of time to make them depends on all sorts of things. The subject matter (animals tend to be quicker than vehicles); what the texture is (reptile scales take ages to get right, smooth skin is easy, fur is somewhere in the middle); and the more detailed the drawing, the longer it’ll take. But generally speaking, I reckon an average of 10 hours per image sounds about right.”

Tom said that the number of submissions he gets from other kids’ parents varies. “It’s completely dependent on what’s happening on Instagram at that time. We recently had a big spike in followers and were getting well over 50 drawings sent to us a week, but now it’s settled down to a few per day.”

We also wanted to learn more about Tom’s kids’ artistic talents. “Dom and Al are 11 and 9 now, so I can’t really use their recent drawings because they’re a bit too sophisticated and have lost much of their naivety,” the dad said. “Luckily, I’ve still got quite a few of their old ones stored away. These days, the boys are a bit more into gaming than drawing, although Al does tend to create quite a lot of weird characters with strange heads. I haven’t done Things I Have Drawn versions of them yet.”

After years of photoshopping his kids’ drawings, Tom’s Instagram account now has over 972k followers. The idea behind the account is simple (even though it takes tons of work) and something that plenty of us have probably thought about doing—that’s why it works.

Tom’s journey into the art of bringing children’s drawings to life started when he saw that his son Dom drew a picture of a weird-looking animal, and he noticed that he (like most kids) draws the eyes and mouth on the same side of the animal’s head.

“The thought crossed my mind that maybe it was us adults not looking at the world correctly and that maybe the kids had it right. So I decided to take to Photoshop and reimagine animals, faces, vehicles, and objects just like kids had drawn them,” Tom told PopSugar’s Angela Law.

The creative dad now photoshops not just his own kids’ drawings but also those of other children: plenty of parents submit their little munchkins’ doodles for him to bring to life, and it doesn’t look like the flow will stop any time soon. 

If you want to see what your kid’s drawing would look like in reality, send Tom a photo of it—you might just get lucky. And if you love the pictures so much that you want something more permanent, you can always check out Tom’s book Things I Have Drawn: At The Zoo.