Above: this is me working on my Daleks "HuMural", as seen in the previous post. I'm going to draw a smaller version for a 10-year-old boy from Shropshire who wanted to take this home with him!
Exhibitions are a key part of the festival. Here's one of my cartoons from the I Don't Believe It! exhibition, at the Bear Steps Gallery. All the cartoons are on the festival's magic, myth and mystery theme. The exhibition runs until May 8. This was photographed from the wall using a phone, hence the dodgy quality (of the picture that is, I can't comment on the joke!)
Working on reverse caricaturing, I was well and truly out of my comfort zone. I did it for more than an hour and there was a constant stream of children, all with a good idea of who they wanted to be: Spider-Man, Doctor Who, Cleopatra, er, "a soldier in a war" ... you name it.
It was very tiring but a good experience. You soon learn that you're unlikely to produce a masterpiece, but it doesn't matter. It's the performance of drawing that people like to see, and if you can throw in a few jokes, using props, speech bubbles, etc, you get away with it.
Here's me singing, accompanied by Tim Harries on ukulele. Judging by my "talk to the hand" gesture, not to mention the bemused look on Noel Ford's face, this was when we performed our unique version of Half Man Half Biscuit's Joy Division Oven Gloves on the Friday night. You had to be there.
Another vintage year at Shrewsbury, then. Looking forward to 2011 already.
You can see more Shrewsbury pictures than the human brain can cope with over at the Bloghorn's Flickr group. Thanks to Jason Chatfield, Jenny Henrywood, Alex Hughes and Gerard Whyman for additional pictures used here.