As the end of the year approaches, it's time for a round-up of my cartooning highlights, as seen through this blog. Don't worry, I'm only doing 2009, not the whole decade, as most papers seem to be doing these days ...
The main highlight of the year has to be being a member of the Cartoonists team on TV's Eggheads, especially as we won!
The Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival is always a highlight of the cartooning year. As is the Big Draw.
It's always great when posts on the blog touch a chord with people. And If this isn't nice, I don't know what is and Keep Calm and Carry on Drawing, above, both got a good reaction.
It's also good to get good feedback from published cartoons, of course, and inevitably this happens most with cartoons in Private Eye. The Picasso cartoon and Granny on drugs went down well, someone emailed me to tell me they carry a copy of the latter around with them to show it to people! But the most astounding reaction was to the cartoon that appeared to show purveyors of organic food in a less than positive light ... I sold many copies to owners of organic food businesses, deli owners etc. Go figure.
"Everything here is organic, free-range, naturally produced, locally sourced, pesticide free, minimally packaged, and fairly traded – and yet, ironically, I am a complete bastard."
Contributing to the PCO's Travelling Moleskine, which was organised by the Culture Vulture was fun.
Getting a reaction to my IT Crowd-based cartoon from Graham Linehan, writer of the show, made me see there could be something to that Twitter lark.
It was amazing to find out that there was once another cartoonist called Royston who I later found out was a woman. I was sent a book featuring her work so I was able to see her brilliant Disney cartoon and other more saucy stuff.
It was nice to be one of the few cartoonists to win the Reader's Digest caption competition. And a caption contest with a difference over at the CCGB website proved to be a fun challenge.
Commission me in 2010, why dontcha?
