More book

A couple of pictures of my book, so you know it's, like, actually real.

Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival

Presenting my 'Humural' cartoon from last weekend's Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival. Here's the official website. Pics from 2009 taken by cartoonist Gerard Whyman should be up soon. And, here's the Professional cartoonists' Association blog about the whole event.

Crystalline Structure Friday- the book!

I've put a book together of my cartoons, which is available to buy from lulu.com at a very reasonable (ok, unreasonable) price of about 9 quid. I chose a rather lovely format for the book, it's about novel size, but this seems to have made it more expensive than I thought. If you are desperate to see 100 or so of my cartoons, both published and unpublished, then this is the book for you. Or alternatively, you could meet me in person and I will give you a copy. I live in Moscow. See you there!

If you really, desperately want to know why it's called Crystalline Structure Friday, you'll also have to buy the book.

Almost quite interesting

Stephen Fry is a lot harder than he looks. This phrase could be taken in many ways, but in this case it refers to drawing him. This is my second attempt after the first abortive one a few months ago. I'm still going for very simple shapes (I particularly like the 3 circle face formation that I stumbled across), but this time with a looser feel to the line and colour.

I think I draw too fast

I've been fiddling with screentoaster.com, and decided to record myself drawing a cartoon, because I promised in a previous post that I would show the various stages I go through. I chose a simple idea, not one I'm even sure I will send out, but one that would show how I go about creating a finished gag. From start to finish it took about 9 minutes! Pretty quick - Maybe too quick. I ought to slow down or people will think it's easy being a cartoonist. It's not. Its INCREDIBLY HARD.

Vote Vote Vote

You can vote for the caption for my cartoon now. In fact the voting is probably nearly closed already. Using my cartoon has made this thing a shambles if you ask me. Perhaps next months competition with a cartoon by Len Hawkins will be better.

vote now!

In other news, my Rock, Paper, Scissors cartoon has finally appeared in Reader's Digest, and I had this silly one in last month's Prospect. Nothing in the new one, though. Grrrr.



A big problem with trying to sell gag cartoons is that the mags often pick what you would consider to be a 'filler' gag (one that just bulks up the batch-sort of like every song on every Sting album). When I sent out the batch the with this one in it, I thought there were better ones in there, but Prospect had other ideas. I don't mind though, I'm kind of fond of this. It looks a bit like a Johnny Ryan gag with none of the rudeness.