Happy new year!

From the current Private Eye magazine. Have a good one, folks.

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Season's greetings ...

This cartoon is one of Private Eye magazine's Christmas cards this year. Throughout December I have been posting Christmas cartoons old and new on my Twitter page.

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Merry Christmas to you all.

Nursing Standard cartoons

I draw cartoons weekly for Nursing Standard magazine. As you might expect, they often link with stories in the news. Here are a few examples from recent months.

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Halloween cartoon: Scary technology

Here's a halloween cartoon drawn for an article on the eeDesignIt website which argues that we should "forget vampires, ghouls and monsters under the bed. What’s really scary is the pace of technology hurtling towards us at 1,000mph."

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Brexit and fake news at Herne Bay Cartoon Festival

Pic: Kerry Riley

Here's me -- suppressing that moment of panic when faced by a huge blank board -- at the Herne Bay Cartoon Festival, which I helped organise, on Sunday 6 August.

I filled the board with Brexit-based gags as seen in Private Eye and New Statesman. Here's a few of them.

Bearing in mind the result of the EU referendum, I assume my efforts were only appreciated by 48 per cent of the audience (probably less as Herne Bay is a bit Ukippy). Some people certainly remained stony-faced.

But it wasn't all biting political satire. As the event was held on the Pier for the first time all the cartoonists got to go on the merry-go-round at the same time. Here's me blowing my own trumpet* with Rich Skipworth and Des Buckley.

Pic: Zoom Rockman

*It's not mine it's Des's. And it's a bugle.

I co-curated the main festival exhibition at Beach Creative gallery, which was full of top-notch stuff, as ever. Lots of cartoons on fake news and Donald Trump. Here's a couple of mine.

Cartoonist Glenn Marshall put together a "fringe" show Mona Lisa: Not Happy, consisting of parodies of the famous painting in cartoons and other art forms. Here's one of my contributions, a foray into Photoshop art.

There was the usual stuff you get at a festival: cartoonists drinking, playing ukulele etc. but I'll spare you the pics. All in all, another cracking  Herne Bay festival.

I wrote a fuller report, with lots of pictures, for the Procartoonists blog which you can read here.

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Humorous illustration: No punchline required

Humorous illustration is slightly different to joke, or gag, cartoons: you use a funny or odd scenario, usually to illustrate an article in a magazine, newspaper or website, without necessarily having a punchline, as you would in a joke cartoon.

Sometimes these are wordless or they may have words within them as part of the drawing, but they generally don't have a caption or speech bubble.

Here are some examples from the Law Society Gazette.

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Life imitating cartoons (yet again)

This is my sixth entry on this blog where something I drew in a cartoon has happened in real life (you can see one from last year here and links to the others here) but I think this is my favourite because it was deliberate.

It made my day when I saw it on Twitter! Thanks to Darren Smith. The original Private Eye cartoon is below. It's one of the most popular cartoons I've done.

Darren's clocks featured at a festival he holds at his home. I've suggested that next time he should recreate this old Reader's Digest cartoon. Might need to carry out a risk assessment first though ...

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Cartoons from The Spectator and Private Eye

"I knew I shouldn't have bothered with this internet of things nonsense ..."

Here's a bumper selection of recent gags from The Spectator and Private Eye, to make up for the fact that a whole month went by without me posting anything here.

"Stay! Sit! Be mindful!"

"Yeah, I'm pretty old school."

"We've liberated the city at last! I'm sure it's around here somewhere ..."

"D-minus? No way! This is fake news."

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Prospect cartoon: The blind date

"Darren's mate is a real catch, he's a barrister."

Cartoon from the current issue of Prospect magazine. This came from an overheard conversation about someone who had somehow confused these two occupations. Cue furious scribbling in notebook. Watch what you say around cartoonists. 

Bearded hipsters are one of my favourite things to draw right now. Here's another in a coffeeshop cartoon from Private Eye a few months back.

"You say lar-tay, I say latt-ay, let's call the whole thing off."

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"You can learn a lot from Lydia ..."

Here's a video showing the drawing of a cartoon from last week's Private Eye, with appropriate soundtrack.

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