Money cartoon: Thinking ahead

"I told him about his pension -- now he's sulking because he wants to take early retirement."

Here's a cartoon drawn for the Money page of September's Reader's Digest. It accompanies an article about getting pensions for your children. No, really. As if clothing them, feeding them and keeping them in the latest gadgets isn't enough, they now want a retirement plan too!

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Financial cartoon: More caption fun

One of my clients, the financial website This is Money, asked me to provide a cartoon from my files, with wording removed, for an online caption competition. Previously they had used a stock photo.

This is different in format to the Reader's Digest caption contest (which I am in this month) as readers simply add their captions to the comments underneath the cartoon, then the site picks the best one. The prize is a copy of Avatar and a Sony Blu-ray DVD player.

It's interesting to see the captions come in (they're just over 300 at the time of writing) though it's fair to say they're a mixed bag. Also, This is Money is a Daily Mail website so many are from, er, a certain political perspective.

Click here to see the competition

Business magazine cartoon: Bank on it

"I'm sensing that there's a lack of trust here, Mr Trubshaw."

Here's a cartoon drawn for an international business magazine to accompany an article about how difficult it is to know what to do with one's money these days (I wish I had that dilemma!) what with the lack of faith in banking after the financial meltdown, the Bernard Madoff scandal and so on.

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Financial cartoons are not overdrawn

Here's a selection from a bunch of icon-style cartoons I drew for a financial website. They appear on the site even smaller than you see here, so it was a new experience for me to produce cartoons that work in that space.

I was given a list of subjects to illustrate: pensions, tax, mortgages, banks, debt, internet shopping and so on. The first thing I learned was that less is more. On the first few I'd put in detail that simply couldn't be seen when I reduced them down. So I had to start throwing things out.

In the end, I found that as so little detail was required I could create them entirely on the computer, rather than drawing on paper, scanning and colouring on screen, which is the way I usually work. There was no need to worry about line and certainly no space for elaborate composition.

Ironically, considering financial matters are not my strong point, I found this to be a fun job.

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Business cartoon: Economic woes

Here's a cartoon from the January edition of Reader's Digest. Cartoons are often based on current phrases and cliches that we hear a lot, usually in the media. This is one of those kind of gags. It's just a play on words really, but I think you can get away with jokes like that if it offers a good visual image. I had fun drawing this one, imagining what a black hole in an office would look like.

Cartoons by Royston