Kicking it old school: My Big Board

Note: Draw this ... but in the olden days
"What? There's no 'Victorianise' filter in Photoshop??"

This was attached to my Big Board at the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival at the weekend, where the theme was Sport. I'd originally planned something else but they wanted a Victorian theme for the Market Square boards, to celebrate the "Olympian Games" held in nearby Much Wenlock in 1850, which inspired the revival of the modern Olympics.

The festival programme featured my old "offside" cartoon, which I'd submitted for exhibition, so I thought it would be fun to do a Victorian take on that. Of course, anyone watching me draw could see that despite the jokey notice above, I had the whole thing worked out beforehand and was working from that. I'd scaled the drawing: 6in by 8in for the 6ft by 8ft board. Taking no chances!

I gave all the characters Victorian garb, the mug became a chintzy teacup, the ketchup bottle became an early bottle of "Heinz's Catsup" (thank you Google Image Search) and there was even a cameo role for the New Yorker's Victorian dandy Eustace Tilley, on the left, an in-joke spotted by a few cartoonists when I'd completed the board.

I had a few hours to do the pencilling after arriving in Shrewsbury on Friday afternoon. Some cartoonists like to do a "big reveal" with the punchline, but I figured that there were so many people coming and going, I may as well say what the joke was from the beginning. People can usually "get it" even when the drawing is not quite finished.

I'd decided to paint the cartoon in sepia tones and set about this on the Saturday. I wasn't the only cartoonist to settle on this plan of action, as you can see from Clive Goddard's cartoon on the left behind mine, and there were others. At first I found it a bit of a struggle, as I started off way too dark at the top and bottom. (Thanks to Timothy King for this photo.)

Here's how it came out in the end. I was fairly pleased with it, but having never done a sepia painting before I felt like I wanted to do another based on what I'd learned. But maybe not a 6ft by 8ft one. It got some great reactions though, so I was happy enough as I headed off to the pub...

"I must say, your explanation of the offside rule was most pertinent."

Here's a time-lapse video, put together by Gerard Whyman, of the Big Boards being painted. I'm in here at 4.27 ...



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Staring into the abyss at Shrewsbury

So, another Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival has been and gone. Monday was the traditional comedown day -- it's always a weekend that involves lots of work and socialising and very little sleep -- and today I find myself facing deadlines brought forward because of Easter, so the full report will have to wait until later.

Meanwhile, here's a pic (courtesy of Ian Ellery) of me with knitted brow, facing a very large, blank board.

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Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival gets under way

The 2011 Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival starts today and runs until Sunday. I'll be there from tomorrow, working on a Big Board in the market square and trying to get to see and do as much cartoony stuff as possible.

There will be talks, exhibitions, caricaturing, workshops, the lot. I'll be making Twitter updates -- follow @roystoncartoons -- and will write a full report next week. There will also be up-to-the-minute pictures and tweets live on The Bloghorn courtesy of Matt Buck, Alex Hughes and myself.

If you see me, say hello. And yes, of course I'll be selling copies of my book!

Exhibition cartoon: Ideas man

"Sure, I came up with fire and the wheel – but you're only as good as your last idea."

This original drawing is in a selling exhibition of cartoons in my native North Yorkshire, although as I live 275 miles away I probably won't be going to see the show.

The exhibition, Three Centuries of Cartoon Art, is organised by the Chris Beetles Gallery of St James's, London, but will be held at Nunnington Hall, near York. A colour version of the cartoon was in Prospect magazine in 2008.

You can see the full exhibition online here.

Weather cartoon: Letting it all hang out

"Tut! Some people! First bit of warm weather ..."
Apologies for the full-frontal nudity, there's no watershed on the internet! This cartoon is in the new issue of Private Eye. It was inspired by the warm weather we had last week. The first sings of spring, we all cried! As I write, it is grey and overcast.

This gag is kind of "sequel" to this one from summer 2009.

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Exhibition cartoon: Marriage à la Mode

Last night I went to the opening of the exhibition Marriage à la Mode at the Cartoon Museum in London. I've got a couple of cartoons in the show, including the one above.

The exhibition ties in with the upcoming Royal Wedding, though it is subtitled "Royals and Commoners In and Out of Love", so it is probably unlikely to get the thumbs up from the palace.

This cartoon, which was in Private Eye in 2009, is owned by the journalist and radio presenter Libby Purves, also a patron of the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation, who kindly lent it for the exhibition.

And as if that's not enough middle-class namedropping, my other cartoon in the show was included in a preview on the Radio 4 Today show website.

Marriage à la Mode features some very funny cartoons, from across the ages, and is well worth seeing. It's on until May 22. Oh, and the museum shop is selling copies of my book if you want to save on postage! It's also available to buy online here.

[Cartoon Museum pic from the excellent blog Tired of London, Tired of Life]

Sport cartoon for the Shrewsbury festival

The Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival takes place next month, and the theme this year is Olympian Sports. Here is a gag I submitted for exhibition, one from Private Eye in 2009. Click to enlarge. The dates are April 14-17 and you can see details of what's on here: www.shrewsburycartoonfestival.com

I'll be there, as usual. This year I'll be doing a Big Board in the Market Square, so pop along and say hello (and pick up a copy of my book! Yes, I'll be mentioning it in every blog post for the foreseeable ...)

This is the eighth festival, and will be the sixth I've attended. Here's what I got up to last year, and in 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006. Or click here for all Shrewsbury-related posts.

Car-toon from my new book

"Look out – speed camera!"
Here's a cartoon from a recent Reader's Digest that also features in my new book Penguin vs Polar Bear and Other Ridiculous Cartoons.

Earlier this week the comic-strip writer Roger Kettle (Andy Capp, Beau Peep, Horace) bought a copy of the book and later contacted me with some very nice comments about it. Totally unsolicited, by the way!

"It arrived today, Royston, and it's an absolute delight. I must have had at least a dozen laugh-out-loud moments which, for those of us weary souls who work in this business, is a remarkable return. Well done on a brilliant collection of gems."

I was more than a little chuffed with that mini-review, particularly from someone with an established record in writing jokes. You can buy the book at my Online Shop for £5.99 plus £2 p+p.

Out now: My new cartoon book ...

My first collection of magazine gag cartoons is available now. It's called Penguin vs Polar Bear and Other Ridiculous Cartoons, is 104 pages long and, well, has lots of cartoons in it.

Here's part of the back-cover blurb: "An encounter between a penguin and a polar bear may sound ridiculous, but it is just as plausible as a prehistoric man attending a job interview, or a cat completing a sudoku. Anything is possible in the world of the magazine gag cartoon.

"This collection by Royston Robertson is made up of cartoons featured in Private Eye, Reader’s Digest, The Spectator, Prospect, The Oldie, New Statesman and others. Some are satirical, others just a bit silly, and they cover subjects from art to technology, the environment to religion, history to Health & Safety. All human (and inhuman) life is mocked."

Sound good? The ideal present for the discerning cartoon lover in your life? Then head over to my newly set-up Online Shop.

You can see some of the cartoons there and buy a signed copy of the book for a mere £5.99 plus £2 p+p.

Royston's portfolio website

Great Wall of Ramsgate cartoon close-up

I put this montage together to accompany an article in The Jester, the Cartoonists' Club newsletter, about my Great Wall of Ramsgate cartoon.

As I mentioned in my first blog post on this, the cartoon was based on one published in Reader's Digest a few years back. But that featured just one character. When it came to recreating the cartoon on a 8ft by 4ft board he looked very lonely, so I decided I needed to come up with a few extras.

Royston's portfolio website

Music cartoon: Whale of a time

"Forget whale song, I'm giving them some death metal."

I haven't blogged as much as I'd have liked to lately. This is due to a combination of things, one of which is that I've been busy lately putting together a book collecting cartoons I've had published over the years. More on that once they're back from the printers, but in the meantime here's another cartoon from current issue of the Foghorn, the magazine of the Professional Cartoonists' Organisation.

Royston's portfolio website

Not Yet Sold: Yet another HMV cartoon

"I've pimped your sound system."

As regular readers of this blog will know, I've done many, many HMV dog cartoons over the years. It's like an illness. Quite a few have been published but some, such as this one, are languishing in the Not Yet Sold files.

Click here for more in this series of rejected cartoons: Not Yet Sold.

As is often the case with my rejected cartoons though, this makes an unpaid appearance in the Foghorn, magazine of the Professional Cartoonists Organisation. I even coloured it in for them.

You can read an archive of the Foghorn online, just click the button on the right-hand column of this blog (scroll down). To buy a print subscription to the mag, which comes out six times a year, go here.

Conditions right at last for cloudspotting cartoon

"Hey, that one looks just like a visible mass of condensed water vapour floating in the atmosphere."

I got such a positive reaction to this cloudspotting cartoon which appeared in print a year ago, that I immediately tried to come up with more cartoons on the subject. The cartoon above is one of them and can be seen in this week's Private Eye.

As I've mentioned here before, there can be a large gap between a magazine taking a cartoon and it appearing in print. This one was taken in early March 2010, so it has been almost a year. That's nothing though, I think my personal record is still two years, as mentioned here, and I've heard of even longer waits from other cartoonists.

Royston's portfolio websiteRoyston's portfolio website

Humorous illustration: Social not working

As well as joke cartoons, I draw humorous illustrations to accompany magazine articles. Here's a social-networking cartoon which I was commissioned to draw for a business magazine. Or perhaps it's a social not working cartoon, the idea being that they're communicating online but not so well in the "offline" world.

Royston's portfolio website

Art cartoon: Express yourself

Sometimes I find I come up with ideas for cartoons but have to let them simmer gently for a while.

I must have jotted this one down but was unsure about it, as I didn't draw it up. Then I came across it a few months later and found myself laughing. So I drew it up, and it sold to the first magazine I sent it to.

It's one of two in the current issue of Reader's Digest. Both feature spot colour, rather than full colour, which is effective/lazy, depending on your point of view.

Here are some more art cartoons.

Social-networking cartoon: Don't tweet and drive

Here's a cartoon drawn to illustrate a newspaper article about tweeting and driving. A very real problem, apparently, along with texting and Facebooking while driving.

It amazes me that anyone would use a mobile phone while driving. I sometimes find I can't even listen to the radio and concentrate on the road at the same time!

The first draft of this was slightly more graphic. I lifted this drawing from an earlier, unsold (probably not surprising) cartoon about using phones while driving.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt. The paper didn't go for it, of course.

While on the subject, you can follow me on Twitter, provided you are not driving, of course.

One from the archives: Chicken fun

"You don't think you allow them a little too much free range?"

I keep hearing about the above named book, because it is now out in paperback. This cartoon appeared in Prospect magazine in May last year (along with this one) when the book came out in hardback.

Royston's portfolio website

Cartoon for the Great Wall of Ramsgate

Here's a very big cartoon ...

Cartoon: 8ft by 4ft. Cartoonist: 5ft 8ins (and a half)

This went up on a public art project called the Great Wall of Ramsgate today. I was approached to do this last year. What impressed me about the original flyer looking for contributors is the fact that it included a call for cartoonists, see below, which is rare with this kind of thing.

I don't live in Ramsgate, I live just up the road in Broadstairs, but I'm a regular visitor and was happy to help out. The idea is that the artworks create a mural that will brighten up a rather unsightly 1,000ft-long wall that has been built around the old Pleasurama site on the seafront and is going to be in place for several years. It's looking good so far ...

Rather nice photo, taken from this flickr page

I'm not sure mine fits the brief of "Ramsgate past, present and future" or that it tells "Ramsgate's story". It is a new version of a Reader's Digest cartoon from 2006. But it's a Ramsgate-type scene, with sunburt folk on the beach and a guy with a metal detector. I hope the local council don't get too upset about all the litter under the sand ... or indeed the skeleton.

Here's one of those annoying animated GIF things that shows the process of drawing and painting the board:


Make gif animation

I have drawn cartoons on big boards at the Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival, in 2007 and 2008, but this is the first time I've done a full colour one, and the first time I've done something that will be seen for more than two days. It was outside my comfort zone, but I really enjoyed doing it.

I found working with acrylic paints a great medium for cartoons, far less fussy than watercolours. You can go back and change things when you make mistakes, just like Photoshop!

Here are a few more selections from the wall: Phil Baker's view of the new Thanet wind farm, Ramsgate as seen by Mike Samson, and a painting of nearby Richborough Power Station by Peter Buckey.

And here's one from the people who were kind enough to supply the paints ...

Although the materials were provided, this was not a paying job, as there was no public funding. It's just about people trying to do something for their local environment.

So I now know just how big David Cameron's so-called "Big Society" is: it's 8ft by 4ft.

Royston's portfolio website

Not Yet Sold: Cat and dog cartoon

"I couldn't imagine life without my little getaway in the country."

This cartoon has it all: a dopey looking dog, a sly cat, and the satirising of contemporary middle-class mores. Yet cartoon editors failed to see its charms, so I present it here in my occasional series on rejected cartoons: Not Yet Sold.

Royston's portfolio website

Cycling cartoon: An Olympian effort

Here's a sneak peek at one of the cartoons I have submitted for exhibition at the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival 2011, which takes place in April.

The theme is Olympian Sports, and this is a new version of a cartoon I drew for the Kent Messenger when the Tour de France came through the county in 2007. This version is coloured using Faber-Castell Pitt brush pens, for those that care about that sort of thing.

It was a bit of an Olympian effort coming up with four cartoons on a sporting theme, as it's not a subject I turn to a lot, to say the least. This year I'll also be drawing a Big Board cartoon in Shrewsbury market square, so I need to think of another gag too. That one won't have bicycles in it though. I hate drawing bicycles.

The theme may appear to be a year early, as the London Olympics are in 2012, but it is in fact a tie-in with the Shropshire Olympian Festival, which takes place in June, and the Wenlock Olympian Games, also in Shropshire, in July.

Royston's portfolio website