Drawing for RD at the V&A

Much fun was had last Sunday at the Battle of the Cartoonists, part of the launch of this year's Big Draw, at the V&A in London. That's me, centre, above, with Steve Way, left, and Rob Murray, working on the Reader's Digest banner. Also on our team were Simon Meyrick-Jones and Nathan Ariss.

We were assigned the Raphael cartoon The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, so we drew a bunch of characters around an approximation of it – thanks, Steve! – some reacting to it, some not so much.

As usual, the drawing surface was horrible and the pens were smudgy, but the results have a certain scruffy appeal. Here's a few of the bits I drew.

Yes, I drew a Dalek, purely to appeal to the kids! It seemed to do the trick. And I make no apologies for the Salvador Dalek groaner.

See lots more post-Big Draw stuff at the Procartoonists.org blog here, here, and here.

Afterwards we ate, drank and got a little too merry, as is required at these things. Oh, and we didn't win. Private Eye won. Private Eye always win.

(Thanks to Ger Whyman and Nikki Harries for the photo).

Going into Battle once more

This Sunday I'll be taking part in the Battle of the Cartoonists at the launch of The Big Draw at the V&A in London at 2pm.

I took part, on the Procartoonists.org team, in 2008, at St Pancras International, and in 2010, above, at the Hays Galleria. I had planned to sit this one out but at the last minute another team was needed so Reader's Digest was asked to form one and I was asked if I wanted to take part.

The full list of teams is: Private Eye, Reader's Digest, The Sun, The Telegraph, The Guardian/Observer, Big Girls Drawers and Procartoonists.org. The seven teams will be tasked with coming up a comic response to seven cartoons (the non-funny kind) by Raphael. And we don't know which one we'll get until minutes before we start!

See the full list of cartoonists taking part here. To see more about the launch, which this year is called Big Draw, Big Make and runs from 11am-5pm, go here and download the programme. Come along and, er, nod approvingly ... apparently there's no clapping or cheering allowed in the Raphael Room!

Photo courtesy of Denis Dowland

Battle of the Cartoonists 2010

Well, the PCO/Foghorn magazine team put together a cracking banner for the Battle of the Cartoonists at the Big Draw on Saturday, but we were pipped at the post in the "cheer-o-meter" by Private Eye.

I've written a full report on the day's fun and games over at the Bloghorn. Pictured above, with the banner, are, left to right, Cathy Simpson, Ian Ellery, myself, Robert Duncan and Nathan Ariss. Thanks to Denis Dowland for the photos.

The theme was "Make your mark on the future", and here's one of my cartoons:

Royston's portfolio website

Doing battle at The Big Draw

This weekend I'll be taking part in the Battle of the Cartoonists, part of the Big Draw Festival in London.

I'm on the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation team and we'll be competing against teams from Private Eye and The Guardian. The idea is that each team produces a banner on the festival theme of "Make Your Mark on the Future".

This year we're at The Scoop, an ampitheatre close to City Hall, aka the Greater London Assembly building, and Tower Bridge on the South Bank. The Battle takes place on Saturday between 3.15pm and 5pm. Voting is by public approval, so come along and cheer for us! There will also be workshops for cartoon enthusiasts of all ages.

I last took part in 2008, that's the banner we came up with above. That event took place at the revamped St Pancras station, hence the train tickets motif.

Big Draw a huge success

I went along to the Big Draw launch at the Idea Generation gallery in London on Saturday with my son. We both had a brilliant time, with his prolific drawing output putting me to shame.

The icing on the cake was the fact that our team won in the Battle of the Cartoonists! I've written a full "match report" on that over at The Bloghorn.

Don't forget that the drawings in the gallery's Now We Are Ten show, including mine, above (click to enlarge) and banners from previous Battles, are to be auctioned at 7.30pm this Thursday (September 17). All proceeds go to the Campaign for Drawing. For more details click here, and to see artwork and place bids online click here.

Royston's portfolio website

Big Draw exhibition opens

The Battle of the Cartoonists banner (click images to enlarge) which I helped to create last year, as a member of the PCO team, is now on show at the Big Draw exhibition "Now We Are Ten".

The show opened yesterday at the Idea Generation Gallery, 11 Chance Street, London. This drawing is also in it.

The exhibition includes work by the likes of Steve Bell, Gerald Scarfe, Quentin Blake Tony Husband and Posy Simmonds. Illustrious company. I guess I'm one of the cartoonists described in the blurb as "up-and-coming". I wonder how long you have to be up-and-coming before you get there?

The drawings will be auctioned at 7.30pm on September 17 at the gallery. All proceeds go to the Campaign for Drawing. For more details click here, to see artwork and place bids online click here.

The 2009 Battle of the Cartoonists, along with cartoon workshops, takes place this Saturday (September 12) at the Idea Generation gallery. The event kicks off at 2pm with the workshops, and the Battle gets underway at 3pm. It goes on until 5pm when the banners are put to the public vote.

I'll certainly be going along to show my support for the PCO team. And my son, who is seven and loves drawing, will be coming along to take part in the workshops.

Royston's portfolio website

Cartoon for Big Draw auction

Here's a cartoon (click to enlarge) which I submitted this week for an exhibition and auction which is to be run by The Campaign for Drawing, the people behind the annual Big Draw events.

A larger version of this cartoon was featured on the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation's banner which we created at the St Pancras Big Draw last year. The banner itself will also be auctioned, if anyone's got enough room for it.

Details on the exhibition and auction are below. Click to read, or visit the Campaign for Drawing website. Why not go along and see if there's anything you want to bid for? The auction raises money for the Campaign so they can carry on their excellent work.


Royston's portfolio website

Interviewed by The Culture Vulture

Here's a link to another interview, a short one this time, for The Culture Vulture, the organisation behind the Travelling Moleskine project. It covers some of the same ground as the Your Thanet one, to be honest, but with the emphasis on matters Moleskiney. (More on that here.)

Royston's portfolio website

The Travelling Moleskine

I recently took part in a Travelling Moleskine project, as part of this year's Big Draw event. The Moleskine notebook is doing the rounds of members of the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation and idea is that each person makes his or her mark then passes it on, via the post, to the next volunteer.

The theme for the drawings is "naughtiness" and I gave them something old and something new. The old was this re-drawn version of a gag which featured in Prospect magazine in 2005.


"I don't need to check anything with 'the boys in forensics', I know it was you."

I traced this from a copy of the original and pasted into the Moleskine book. Cheating a little bit, I know, so I drew direct the following oddity directly onto the notebook page.


They were the naughty children we were warned about: Leaned back too far on his chair; The wind changed; Swallowed apple pips; Went blind doing "that"

It was a chance to do something different to the usual gags. It came out OK, I think, though I found it a tricky surface to work on as the paper is quite dark, plus it seems to absorb the ink very quickly, leaving a line considerably more dull than the deep black lines I'm used to.

Around 30 Moleskines have been sent out by the Culture Vulture, the organisation acting on behalf of the Campaign for Drawing, which stages the Big Draw every autumn. More details on the Moleskines can be found at theculturevulture.co.uk and you can see some of the works so far at this Flickr group

Royston's portfolio website

Review of the Year type thing

As every magazine and newspaper you open at the moment seems to have a review of the year, from every possible angle, I thought I’d do a cartooning review year, as seen through this blog.

So, here are my personal 2008 highlights. If you think that it reads more like one of those round robin letters you get with Christmas cards, feel free to crumple it up and throw it in the bin.

The Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival was definitely a major highlight of 2008. This year’s was the best one yet in terms of the quality of the exhibitions. Plus, as ever, it was a great social gathering. Here's my "big board":


I really enjoyed being part of the Professional Cartoonists Organisation team at the Big Draw. We didn’t win but we did produce a striking banner. I got a kick from having cartoons exhibited at the Chris Beetles Gallery for the first time. I sold most of them, too. Which was nice.

Talking of exhibitions, they've had some superb ones at the Cartoon Museum this year. The most recent I attended was the Giles show, complete with a reconstruction of his studio. Then there was the Beano and Dandy one, which I reviewed for the PCO blog. But I think my favourite was the show of cartoons by the Punch cartoonist Pont, back in May, which I also reviewed.

This year I drew a strip for indie heroes The Wedding Present … but the best part was being name-checked on their new album as a result! Rock 'n' roll. I was chuffed to get a desert island cartoon published for the first time and I also got a kick out of the fact that one of my cartoons went to the Antarctic. I got a lot of great feedback from one gag more than any other this year, though – the one below, which was in Private Eye.

It just proves that everyone loves a cat cartoon! There are several other highlights I could mention, mainly social gatherings with other cartoonists. I tend not to blog about these at length, as they’re private occasions, but they're always great fun. And it never ceases to amaze me that cartoonists, who are all very much in direct competition with each other, tend to get on so well!

One gathering that I will single out, though, took place just last week ... a team of us from the PCO took part in an audition for the TV quiz show Eggheads. We don’t know yet if we’re gong to get on the show, but even if we don’t we had such a laugh doing it that it was worth it just for the experience. And, of course, we all ended up down the pub afterwards. Wish us luck!

Royston's portfolio website

Big Draw banners up for auction

Remember the Professional Cartoonists Organisation banner which we created at the Big Draw back in November? Well, the Campaign for Drawing, which runs the event, has put it up for auction on eBay.

The other "Battle of the Cartoonists" banners, by the teams from Private Eye, The Guardian and The Independent, are also for sale. All profits go to the Campaign for Drawing which, like any small arts charity, is always in need of extra funds.

In a press release, the campaign says:

"Six for the price of one! Individually signed cartoon strips by the brilliant Pete Dredge, Robert Duncan, Royston Robertson and Kipper Williams. A series of cartoon scenes on over-sized train tickets look at the painfully funny side of travel. There are six classic jokes with great appeal for all who have suffered on British public transport. Irresistible to cartoon fanatics, train spotters – anyone with a sense of humour!"

So get your credit card out. You'll need a pretty big bank balance as well as a big wall though!

Royston's portfolio website

Big Draw at very big train station

Another Big Draw has come and gone. This time at the revamped (and very large) St Pancras International in London.

My role this year was to be one of the four cartoonists drawing a banner for the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation, on the theme of "Transports of Delight". We were competing in the Battle of the Cartoonists against teams from Private Eye, The Independent and The Guardian. So we were up against such well-known cartooning names as Steve Bell, Martin Rowson, Dave Brown and Ken Pyne.

My team-mates were Pete Dredge, who draws The Directors in Private Eye, greetings card maestro Robert Duncan (that's Rob and Pete holding the banner above) and Guardian business cartoonist Kipper Williams. We had two hours to draw the banner and it was the fastest two hours of my life. We came up with a series of single-panel gags where the frames were drawn to look like train tickets.


Left to right: Kipper Williams, Robert Duncan, myself and Pete Dredge

Voting was by members of the public, on a "who can cheer the loudest" basis and sadly we did not win. That honour went to the Independent, which was nice as the Guardian usually wins. We did get a lot of good feedback from the public though. The design of the banner was much admired, particularly as we were the only team that didn't go for the motif of a train careering off the tracks filled with politicians and City fat cats ...

Here are my gags from the banner (click to enlarge). We had planned to do one each but when we saw the banner we realised it was bigger than we thought! So we had to improvise and do one and a half tickets each, the second being a version of one I posted here just a few days ago.





See the full banner at the PCO blog

Royston's portfolio website

The Big Draw: Transports of Delight

Transports of Delight is the theme for the main cartooning event in the 2008 Big Draw campaign, which this year takes place at St Pancras International Station in London on Saturday (October 18).

The Big Draw is an annual, month-long campaign designed to get the nation drawing. I've taken part in the cartoon-based Big Draw events for the past two years, at Somerset House and Covent Garden respectively, and they're always fun.

This year, for the first time, I will be taking part in the ever-popular Battle of the Cartoonists, where four teams slug it out to produce the best 12ft cartoon banner. I'm on a team of four representing the Professional Cartoonists Organisation (PCO). My team-mates will be captain Pete Dredge, Kipper Williams and Robert Duncan. We'll be up against teams from The Guardian, The Independent and Private Eye.

The Battle of the Cartoonists runs from 3pm-5pm. The winning team is decided clap-o-meter-style – i.e. via vocal public approval, so please come along and shout for us!

There will also be workshops for all ages run by PCO members between 10am and 5pm. So that's the place to be if you want to learn how to draw cartoon characters, caricatures or comic strips.

Activities will take place in The Circle – second side entrance on St Pancras Rd and opposite the Gymnasium. I'm told that the dedicated area will be marked out with artificial grass and picket fencing so you can't miss us.

The Big Draw: Get involved

Royston's portfolio website

Cartooning in the media

This is a version of a cartoon I had published a few years back. I use it by way of illustration, though really it has nothing to do with the following article which is considerably less cynical. It is a short piece I wrote for the PCO blog about media coverage of cartooning

There’s no doubt that cartoons are enjoying an unusually high profile in the British media at the moment.

We’ve seen acres of coverage for the launch of new kids’ comic The DFC, the 70th anniversary of The Beano and Phill Jupitus’s comic strip programme on Radio Four. There has even been a graphic novel serialised in The Times.

So, are cartoonists happy about this? Not a bit of it.

I agree with Neil Dishington, who wrote on the PCO blog yesterday, that the Phill Jupitus thing was nothing special, but is that because we’re cartoonists and therefore he’s preaching to the converted? I think it’s likely that many listeners would have found Jupitus’s sincere enthusiasm about comic strips quite infectious.

Isn’t it a good thing that shows like these exist? Is it not the case that the only thing worse than the media talking about cartoons is the media not talking about cartoons?

But they misrepresent cartooning, some cartoonists cry, it’s obvious they don’t know what they’re talking about. Well, maybe. I’m sure I heard James Naughtie talking about "animators" at The Beano on the Today show on Monday, but is there a single profession that doesn’t think it is often misrepresented by the media? I know journalists who think the media misrepresents them.

Another common complaint is that any media obsession with cartoons is just a passing fad. Again, that may be true, perhaps they’re using cartoons to cheer us up amid all the credit crunch stuff, but then that is the role of most cartoons. And let’s not forget that the media treats many subjects in a faddish way before moving on to the next thing.

And as for the grumbling over celebs such as Jupitus drawing cartoons, cartooning has always been something where everyone wants to have a go. That's because it's fun. We often encourage that attitude, at events such as The Big Draw and the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival.

All you can do is keep on doing good cartoon work and hope that those who commission cartoons for publication will realise that it is best to go to a professional.

Royston's portfolio website

Cartoonists meet the public: Big Draw 2007

I took part in The Big Draw at Covent Garden at the weekend. The Big Draw is an annual, nationwide campaign to get people enthusiastic about all kinds of drawing.


A marquee was set aside specifically for cartooning. There were workshops on strips, caricatures etc. with cartoonists on hand to offer tips, advice and encouragement to those taking part.


Here's me doing a spot of “reverse caricaturing” (Thanks to John Stilgoe for the pic.) This is where people put their faces through a board, like the ones you see at the seaside, except it’s blank and the participants say what kind of body they’d like. Very popular with the kids: lots of fairies, pirates, princesses, animals and a couple of Bart Simpsons. I probably had to draw a few too many girls as butterflies than was strictly necessary. All good fun though. The whole event reminded you of how much people love cartoons – grown-ups as well as kids. I hope there were some art editors from magazines and newspapers taking note!

Like last year, there was a Battle of the Cartoonists, where four teams competed to produce a banner on the theme of “High Life, Low Life”. Again there were teams from Private Eye, The Guardian and The Independent, plus this year there was a team from the new Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation. The banners were put to the public vote, with those clever clogs from The Guardian, led by Steve Bell, winning again. There's more on the Battle at the PCO Blog

There are Big Draw events throughout the UK right now. See their website for details.

The Big Draw

I attended the launch of The Big Draw, the annual campaign to get the nation, young and old, drawing. Myself and fellow Cartoonists' Club members spent part of Sunday in a marquee, encouraging kids to draw funny faces and offering tips and advice ... though to be honest, few of them seemed to need any, as they were very keen.

Here is some of their handiwork:



The Battle of the Cartoonists was fun too. Teams representing Private Eye, The Guardian, The Independent and that laugh-a-minute publication the Financial Times, each produced a banner on the day's theme of "Amazing Space", as the event was held in the marvellous Somerset House. These were then put to the public vote, with The Guardian emerging victorious.


It was a very well-attended, well-organised day, with beautiful sunny weather (the kids were playing in the fountains!) There are Big Draw events throughout the UK in October. See their website for details.