Still basking in that post-Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival glow? Didn’t manage to attend this year? (Shame on you) It was another great festival, ramped up by a lovely retrospective exhibition of the last 10 years of festivals. As ever, the quality of caricaturing, enormo-cartooning on 3m x 2m boards, humural on-the-spot cartooning and ukelele orchestras (uh?) was sky-high, and rubbing shoulders with the UK’s finest cartooning talent was an honour as always.

Here’s my ‘big-board’ cartoon – it started off with a single mummy, and developed into a raggedy bunch of nasties, on the wise advice of Rob Murray and Alexander Matthews.

A tradition of Shrewsbury Cartoon festival mealtimes is that cartoonists will scribble all over the (paper) tablecloths. Here’s a shot of me working on Friday night’s tablecloth, entitled ‘Democratic Republic of the Conga’. Each character drawn by a different cartoonist, including Charlie Adlard, Jonathan Cusick, ChiChi Parish,  Andrew Birch, Matt ‘Hack’ Buck, Tim Harries and many more! (I’ll post a pic of the finished ‘masterpiece’ if I can find one.)

Lots more photos and coverage of the festival over at the Procartoonists.org blog.

Un o nifer o lunie wnes i ar gyfer ‘Dyddiadur Ffarmwr FFowc’, wedi’i gyhoeddi gan Y Lolfa

One of a number of illustrations commissioned for ‘Ffarmwr Ffowc’, published by Y Lolfa Press.

Poster recently commissioned for Australian breakdown service NRMA.

The Festival teamed up with The South Wales Echo in running a competition to name the animal mascots of the festival. Sorry to anyone still hoping to enter, time’s up!
The winner was Miss Emily Crocker , 8, of Newport, who chose the names of her favourite Roald Dahl characters – Matilda, Miss Honey, James, Bruce and George. I’ll leave you to remember which books they’re from!

Roald Dahl, as a celebrated son of Cardiff, is well-represented during the festival. Join in the Dahl treasure hunt on Saturday around the city centre, or get involved in some of the other great events: the big zombie walk, searching for Wally, workshops and talks by some amazing kids writers and illustrators, and lots more. All here!

My personal must-sees – Paul Steward & Chris Riddell, Martin Brown (Horrible Histories), and the Epic beatboxing machine, Ed Holden!

So I prepared a thought-provoking and stimulating workshop on writing for comics, aimed at writers with little experience in the field, and littler ability or interest in drawing. The audience turns out to be a bunch of amazing illustrators and artists instead. Whoops. Still, I hope maybe somebody  picked up something of use amongst my confused ramblings. There were certainly a few amusing and beautiful comics produced in the short time we had, which was of course more to do with the talent of the artists than the speaker. Three of these are below – check out their happy scribblings…

Sarah Edmonds 

Deborah Withey 

Chris Glynn