A Kent horse and a seaside folk festival

Through the medium of a cartoon in a Kent newspaper, this week I attempted to solve an ongoing problem that is troubling the good people of the county.

For those not in the know, although Mark Wallinger's white horse design, which is to stand at Ebbsfleet, has been agreed (and dubbed "the Angel of the South" by the media) there are many in Kent who want it to be a rearing horse, the traditional "invicta" symbol of the county. With a little ingenuity, I reckon we could keep both camps happy ...

Might need a bit of extra public funding, and quite a bit of maintenance, but I reckon it could work!

More local news: Broadstairs Folk Week, the annual festival which takes over our town for a week every August, got going at the weekend. Here are a few on-the-spot sketches from the daily fun and games laid on for the kids at the seafront bandstand. Drawn on official Folk Week headed notepaper! (Click to enlarge.)

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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

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Swine flu cartoon

"With swine flu, we need to get the message across to the public that there is no need to panic."

This was drawn for a publication for health service managers. It's a regular commission I've had for some years, and the cartoon always features the same characters at a board meeting. So it was fun to put them all in swine flu masks.

You can see other cartoons in the series here, here, and (a very old one) here.

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Five years as a full-time cartoonist

"Excuse me, could I have five minutes of your time?"

Today marks five years since I became a full-time freelance cartoonist. Friday 30th July, 2004, was my last day of salaried employment, then I had the weekend off to think, "Argh, what have I done?" before starting work on Monday 2nd August by staring at a blank piece of paper.

It's been an up and down few years, as most freelance work is, not helped recently by the recession. But the wolf has been kept from the door, even if he has sometimes got worryingly far up the garden path. And I have really enjoyed it.

I've developed far more, in terms of drawing and writing, than I would have if I had not had so much time to dedicate to cartooning. (The cartoon above, which appeared in Private Eye, was drawn not long after I went full-time, I think my style has developed a lot since then.) I have also had more time to get involved with cartoon organisations, events, festivals etc.

Anyway, I'll celebrate with a tipple tonight, and will drink to the next five years.

Help keep me in gainful employment by buying my cartoons!

Reader's Digest cartoon caption competition

This cartoon is the Reader's Digest "Beat the Cartoonist" drawing for August. The idea is that readers submit their captions, and the three best ones are posted on the website alongside my original wording. There's no clue as to which is the original, of course.

Visitors to the site then choose their favourite and if a reader's caption gets the most votes, that reader wins a cash prize and the original drawing.

I'll try not to sink into a deep depression if readers pick someone else's caption. As compensation for the hurt caused to us sensitive artists, we get paid extra for the original artwork anyway.

They certainly picked one with a lot of drawing in it. This took me ages. And I wasn't very happy with it, so I put in on the lightbox and drew it again. Which means that the artwork that someone may win is remarkably Tipp-Ex free ... a desirable item indeed!

Click here to go to the "Beat the Cartoonist" web page

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Cartoon graffiti

"HELLO. who ARE you. whats your story?" asks this piece of graffiti, spotted by my three-year-old daughter during a train trip from Broadstairs to Whitstable yesterday.

Most graffiti consists of slogans, or names, declaring something. But this anonymous drawing turns it around and asks the viewer questions. Call me daft, but I found that, and the slightly forlorn looking cartoon character, oddly moving.

I don't know if I want to think about what implements people are carrying with them that allows them to scratch drawings into train windows though.

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Rowing cartoon: Size matters

Getting the right size and shape for gag cartoons can be tricky and can require experimentation. Increasingly, I find I'm drawing them in a portrait shape, but with some jokes you have to go landscape.

This cartoon (click to enlarge) appears in this week's Private Eye. Originally the Owl and the Pussycat were rowing with no supplies. After the magazine took the gag, they contacted me to say that the characters were not easy to make out at the size the cartoon would be printed, and they suggested the honey pot to make it more clear. Works OK, I think.

In fact, I wasn't really thinking magazines when I drew this. It was originally drawn on-spec for an exhibition of rowing cartoons that a cartoonist colleague is hoping to stage next year, which is probably why I went for the "wider canvas". I'll let you know the details of the exhibition if and when that goes ahead.

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An old Moon Landing cartoon

"C'mon you guys, I just need my own space sometimes."

This cartoon is so old that it was only 20-odd years since the Apollo 11 Moon Landing when I drew it. The joke is probably even older.

I present it here as we mark the 40th anniversary today, with all apologies. (Yes, I know the Moon is stupidly small, that only two guys ever walked on the moon at a time etc etc. It's clearly not thought through. Nice use of an Earth photo though, right?)

Cartoonists unleashed!

Occasionally I put down my pens, get on a train to London and socialise with other cartoonists. And a right good laugh we invariably have as well. Here's me pictured last week at Prospect magazine's annual summer party, with fellow scribblers Paul Lowe and new boy Rob Murray.

I think my dazed expression is the result of the flash from the camera wielded by another cartoonist, Clive Goddard, and not, as you may think, the effect of too much free wine.

The party was held in the garden behind Prospect's office in Bloomsbury. As is usual on these occasions, I spent most of the time chatting to other cartoonists, and so I failed do any "networking". Darn. There was lots of celeb spotting to be done though, mainly of the Guardian reader/Newsnight viewer variety ("Ooo look there's Martha Kearney!" etc.)

Of course, being invited to a magazine's party is no guarantee that your cartoons will appear regularly in it, and in fact I've not been seen in those pages since February. But they're very nice people who give booze and canapés to cartoonists, so I'll let them off.

Here's the first cartoon of mine that Prospect published, from way back in October 2004.

"Yes, it's a senseless act, but I fail to see how it has 'all the hallmarks of al-Qaida'."

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Cartoon montage: It's all about the Benjamins

Here's an excerpt from a cartoon I drew recently for a business magazine. It was a last-minute decision to use a real image of a banknote and I think it, er, paid off as it works quite well.

It was for an international magazine, hence the use of a "Benjamin" rather than a British banknote. This kind of thing is quick and easy to do these days, thanks to Google Images and Photoshop. I had to tamper with the banknote a bit, making the "100" bigger and clearer. I hope this doesn't mean I'm going to jail?

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The trouble with weather cartoons

The trouble with weather cartoons is that as soon as they reach publication the weather changes.

Looks like we're back to panel one now.

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From the archives: Ten years on the web

Last month marked ten years since I first "launched" (rather a grand word, as nobody noticed) my cartoon portfolio website. I know this as I've still got the HTML pages on my computer. Here's what it looked like in 1999. Click to enlarge.



Hey, internet retro! Man, we loved those line rules back then. I put this together using a very basic grasp of HTML gleaned from a two-sheet A4 handout used by a friend of a friend who used to teach computers. What's amazing is how many sites you see now that still look like this.

The main cartoon was from New Statesman, from the days when they took on-spec gags. Scrolling down (it was only one page at this stage) we see a selection of gags from the Times' Saturday section Metro, now no longer with us.



Excuse the redacted old phone number! In the top left you can see the original of the leopard cartoon that has served me well and which I wrote about in May: Cartoons that keep on going.

My knowledge of HTML is still pretty basic so my portfolio site (which you can find at roystonrobertson.co.uk) may be slightly slicker and more well-stocked with (better) cartoons, but it is still a pretty straightforward affair. But when you're simply presenting cartoons, with a bit of info about them, I don't think you need too many whistles and bells.

Music cartoon: Return of the HMV dog

"Bloody students."

This cartoon, which appears in the July issue of Reader's Digest, was the result of a deliberate attempt at getting more mileage out of a well-worn cartoon theme!

I've had a few HMV dog cartoons published over the years, so I decided to see if I could come up with some more. I opened one of them on my computer in Photoshop and played about with the elements of the drawing – the dog and the gramophone – moving and rotating them, resizing them, copying and pasting etc.

It's an unusual way of developing gag ideas, for me anyway, but I came up with a few. Once I was happy with each one, I printed off the cobbled-together image and redrew it on my lightbox, so it looked more fluid. This is the only one that has been published so far, but you may yet see more HMV dog cartoons from me.

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Sunny weather cartoon: A word of warning

Protect your eyes: Never look directly at pale legs

We British love to talk about the weather, so here's a joke about the lovely sunny spell we've been having lately. This cartoon appears in the new issue of Private Eye.

They say we're in for a "barbecue summer", so get out and enjoy it. By way of a reminder, here's a weather cartoon from last summer.

"Why are we British so obsessed ... with talking about the weather?"

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Redacted cartoon

This cartoon has been redacted but we can assure you that it was very, very funny.

We were all faced with an unfamiliar word last week: redaction, the editing out of certain "sensitive" details from the newly released MPs' expenses claims.

The distinctive black rectangle was a striking visual image and, of course, a gift for cartoonists. You can see a round-up of redacted cartoons at the Bloghorn.

This one of mine didn't sell, but I didn't feel too bad about that because all I did was take an old desert-island cartoon and put a black rectangle on it in Photoshop!

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From the archives: Football cartoon

"I must admit, your explanation of the offside rule was spot on."

Cartoonist Alex Matthews mentions this cartoon as one he wishes he'd thought of in his Cartoonist of the Month interview over at Prospect magazine's blog. It was in Reader's Digest in 2006.

This is one of those that I never had particularly high hopes for when I drew it (I thought it may have been done already) ... so, of course, it is one of the most popular cartoons I've ever drawn!

Hey, look! Here's one of those wordcloud thingies from the Wordle site. Everyone else seems to be doing them, so here's one created with this blog feed. Click to enlarge.


No surprises with most of the words that are prominent, such as "cartoon", "joke" etc. But it's always a bit disappointing that wordclouds highlight such mundane words as "come" and "going".

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Drugs cartoon: Keeping it simple

"Mother, are you sure your marijuana use is purely medicinal?"

This cartoon appears in the current Private Eye. Often, with gag cartoons, when you first come up with the idea you want to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the joke, and then you find you have to simplify it.

With this one, the old lady was originally going to be holding a Bob Marley LP, and I even considered putting her in a "Legalise it" T-shirt, complete with cannabis leaf logo! In the end the Rasta hat and slightly stoned expression seemed to be enough.

There was a time, I think, when I think a cartoon like this would have been considered racist, as it plays on black stereotypes. Thankfully, we've moved on. The fact is that a lot of humour, particularly cartoons, plays on clichés and stereotypes, and as long as they're not used to incite hatred, I don't think it's a problem. This TV sketch, for example, may not have been aired a few year ago. But it's not racist, it's just funny.



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Staff handbook cartoon: Computer trouble

"I told you not to open that attachment."

I was recently commissioned to draw a series of cartoons to illustrate an organisation's staff handbook. Here's one of them, it accompanies the section on computers.

The joke here was originally used in a gag cartoon which I sent out as part of an on-spec batch to all the usual magazines. It did not sell, but I always thought it was a fun joke, so I was glad to give it an airing (and get paid for it, of course) in a different context.

Rejected cartoons, or the jokes within them, will often get used somewhere other than the newsstand magazines, so the time spent on them is rarely wasted.

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Elections cartoon: Don't forget to vote

"Something tells me they're expecting a low voter turnout."

Here's a local paper cartoon on today's Euro and council elections. Like many people who are more than a bit disillusioned with politics, I'll be going along to vote out of a sense of duty to the process itself, rather than dedication to any particular candidate or party.

This is nothing to do with the recent MPs' expenses scandal, by the way, I was disillusioned way before that! I do know I won't be transferring my vote to the British National Party, and I find it bizarre that anyone would vote in such a way to "punish" the main parties over expenses. Maybe I should spoil my ballot paper by drawing a cartoon on it. It might at least cheer up one of the people who have the thankless task of counting all the votes.

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Heaven Knows I'm Mozzerable Now

Last night I attended the AGM of the Cartoonists' Club in London. It was not the most fun meeting ever, as major changes are afoot at the club, so there was much raising of voices and pointing of fingers. (Not from me I might add!) However, I did come away with a couple of fun caricatures by Simon Ellinas, left, and Paul Baker.

I am of course, not the most difficult of people to caricature. Once you've got the qiuff, the glasses and the eyebows you've more or less captured me. Well, me or Morrissey.

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