[This post is mainly written so that when people ask me things I have something to point them to.]

Why I’m not taking on freelance cartoon commissions

1) Nearly all of my time is taken up with ongoing work. I’m now doing two days a week in London in an ‘acting web editor’ role for the Church Times, and the rest of my time is spent on paid blogging, doing my regular cartoons for publications, admin, you name it.

2) I’m really not that good at them. By that I mean that commissions take me a huge amount of time, far more than I could ever charge for, and cause a lot of stress, far more than it would be acceptable to publicly moan about.

3) My best work happens when I’m free to choose the subject, captions and pictures. Ideally it is best if I have some knowledge of the topic in question. Recently I’ve had commissions where none of these have been the case, and they haven’t worked terribly well. I don’t like doing work that I do not think is really good.

In future I might go back do doing freelance work, but for now this is the situation. I do have one or two jobs still to finish, but these will be the last. I’m hoping that you’ll see the results in terms of more and better cartoons done just for the fun of it, better blogging, better filing of pieces of paper into numerical order, etc etc.

ENDS

(No idea what the point of ‘ENDS’ is. Just seen other people do it.)

Posted by Dave at 7:42 am on June 24, 2010 and filed under Blogging, CartoonChurch progress, Cartooning.

3 Comments

Warning: If you have no interest in Twitter, the well known internet timewasting service, and Christianity, the well known religion, you will find this post dull and an utter irrelevance.

The Twurch of England is the Church of England on Twitter. The bishops, the clergy, and the… hang on… it’s only the bishops and the clergy! The laity (ordinary people) are nowhere to be found. This is an unjust state of affairs which sends out the message that the ordinary people are not as important as the bishops and clergy. Being mildly deeply upset about this I started a ‘Reform the Twurch’ campaign yesterday – you can read all of the tweets on the subject via the hashtag #reformthetwurch. It was great fun and a most creative protest. Proceedings were conducted calmly and peacefully, and from time to time nuns came out and brought us tea.

Of course there are other Anglicans not in the CofE, and other denominations of Christians who are also not a part of this group. I certainly think it would be good to include these people, although I understand that the ‘Twurch of England’ may not be the most appropriate banner under which to gather them. Perhaps there needs to be an ‘Anglican Twits’ (Anglicans who aren’t CofE) group, and one for ‘UK Twistians’ (UK Christians whether they are Anglican or not). I suspect forming a ‘World Christians’ group might be rather more time consuming.

My challenges to Twurch administrators (The Church Moose and Peter O) are as follows:

1) First of all I think you really need to include CofE laity if you are to go on calling it the Twurch of England. It’s OK, there aren’t many of us and we’re declining in number all the time.
2) Secondly, I understand that you may want to restrict membership of the Twurch of England to members of the Church of England. However, if you don’t find a way to include the wider groups of people (Anglicans, UK Christians) in some way I suspect someone else will. There is an opportunity for a creative individual to form the Anglican Twitter community or the Christian Twitter community, and sooner or later someone will do so.

The picture above has nothing to do with this post by the way. I just didn’t have anything else to put in.

Now… stop trying to distract me – I’ve got work to do. My big important project went a bit better yesterday, for which I am thankful.

Posted by Dave at 10:13 am on March 26, 2010 and filed under Anglican bloggers, Anglican goings-on, Blogging, Church, Ecumenical matters, Religion.

9 Comments

When I walk through the valley of the shadow of the dearth of cartoon inspiration (sorry…) I sometimes need a little encouragement to lift my spirits. Fortunately such a boost occurred yesterday, when I was described by the Telegraph’s Blog Editor Damian Thompson as “the world’s worst cartoonist”. Had he described me as “a mediocre cartoonist” or “a cartoonist of comparatively little merit” it would have stung somewhat, but “the world’s worst cartoonist” is something worthy of being embossed on a plastic keyring, or, as I shall do in due course, written proudly on a blog ‘about’ page, particularly when it comes from such a source.

So how did such an accolade come to be awarded? To quote Damian Thompson’s Twitter message in full:

I have incurred the particular wrath of the world’s worst cartoonist, @davewalker, who jottings decorate the Church Times.

The description of “wrath” was not terribly accurate, but I think he was a little bit cross about a Twitter post of mine.

Please RT: Never supported @earthhour before, but planning to do so just to irritate @holysmoke http://www.earthhour.org/

This was in response to Damian’s post on his Telegraph blog in which he attempted to encourage people to waste as much electricity as they can by turning on all of the lights in their houses during ‘Earth Hour’, a symbolic campaign encouraging people to consider using less electricity. You can read the post in question here: Switch ON your lights for ‘Earth Hour’, 8.30pm, March 27. I think that the fact that my message had been “retweeted” by quite a number of people was the ultimate cause of the grumpiness and grand pronouncement.

Damian Thompson is regarded as something of a figure of fun within Anglican circles. He is one of those people who is unwittingly an evangelist for those things he tries so hard to oppose (Liberals, people who care about the environment, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, Ruth Gledhill, etc etc) owing to the way he tries to make his points. You don’t need me to tell you why – reading his blog will make it evident very quickly. As I said to someone yesterday, if I’m ever in doubt about what I think on an issue I just look up Damian Thompson’s opinion and know I should think the opposite.

Anyway, all most enjoyable, and something that has given me a little bit of a boost during a busy deadline week. Talking of which, I must get back to it. Please excuse a scarcity of blog posts over the next seven days or so.

Posted by Dave at 11:42 am on March 23, 2010 and filed under Blogging, Sundry posts, Utter nonsense.

26 Comments

My dullest blog in the world appears in the latest issue of The Economist. From Analysing the web: Blog mining:

“I NOTICED that the doormat was at a slightly crooked angle. I reached down and moved the mat back into its correct place.” Thus began a recent entry on The dullest blog in the world. Although this publication is something of a satire on the internet’s inane blogs, scientists are finding—to their surprise—that useful information can actually be mined from the tedium of the blogosphere.

The dullest blog in the world is here, or you can follow it via Facebook or Twitter.

[Cartoon from We Blog Cartoons.]

Posted by Dave at 10:06 am on March 15, 2010 and filed under Blogging, Mundane.

3 Comments

Questions have been raised about my appearance on Simon’s Dark Side of the Moon Chaplaincy blog.

Also has anyone ever actually met Dave Walker, in his photos he looks tall and thin…is he? There is a reason for my asking.

I have been trying to work out what these reasons might be. Either the chaplaincy students are planning to knit me a jumper, or the Diocese of Winchester are seeking information about me for a soon-to-be-released photo fit ‘wanted’ poster after my Church Times Blog posts (1,2,3) about the fact they are ceasing to fund Simon’s post. This will mean that unless other initiatives are taken (which they are being) Southampton University will more or less the only university in the UK to be un-pastorally*-cared-for by the Anglicans. Read the whole saga on Simon’s blog and if you want to support his cause join the Facebook group from where news is being posted.

Back to what I look like: So far responses on Simon’s blog suggest that I am “grey-looking and two-dimensional” or, by the Mad Priest: “Dave Walker looks like a geek from a Hollywood teen movie.”

In order to lay these allegations to rest I submit a recent self portrait that proves I am indeed tall and thin:

Whilst I’m here: Thanks for not giving up on this blog. I haven’t been writing it for several reasons. Partly because I’m currently in a continual state of being behind schedule with my diagrams and I’m convinced that the people to whom I owe the work will be continually scanning the internet to see that I’m not frittering my time away. My time therefore needs to be frittered away in other less public ways. There are other reasons too. But I need to remind myself that i do actually quite enjoy writing here, so I will endeavour to post a bit more, starting, I think, with a calendar giveaway in the next day or two.

*Probably not a valid phrase

Posted by Dave at 3:26 pm on December 2, 2009 and filed under Anglican bloggers, Anglican goings-on, Blogging, Cartoons, Church Times blog.

8 Comments

Top Episcopalian blogger Scott Gunn has noticed that I have not been drawing here much and has declared himself to be in a state of impaired blogmunion with me (See Denouncing Dave Walker), so I thought I’d post a cartoon. It is one I did months ago that has been sitting in a sizable ‘to scan’ pile by the way – it wasn’t inspired by Scott’s post. Please forgive the Shrigley-esque crossing out. Usually everything I do is heavily edited so that you can’t see all of the mistakes, but on this occasion I thought my misspelling of ‘genius’ added something.

Scott is absolutely right though – I’ve not been doing enough cartoons on this blog. There are various reasons for this, but I can’t really explain as these days I can’t really write what I’m actually thinking on the internet as it would probably make me look deeply unprofessional, and no-one wants that.

Anyway, summer is coming, which means that I have to get ahead of myself a bit on the cartoon front. Does anyone have any topics they’d like me to cover in my ‘Guide to the Church’ series over the next month or two? No promises that I’ll actually be able to do them, but I’ll try my best to draw some of the topics suggested.

Posted by Dave at 10:28 am on July 18, 2009 and filed under Blogging, Cartoons.

33 Comments

Just to say (for those who aren’t fed up of me going on about it) that I’ll be blogging from the G20 meeting in London’s Docklands over the next few days. Details here.

Barring technical malfunction (not out of the question by any means) I’ll be blogging in these two places:

1. The Church Times blog
2. On my Twitter page

As I’ve said on my Church Times blog post if you have any questions for world leaders I’d be glad to have them. I may well not get the opportunity to ask them, but you just never know.

Posted by Dave at 9:23 pm on March 31, 2009 and filed under Blogging, Current events.

1 Comment

My ‘Dullest blog in the world‘ has received an unexpectedly large number of visitors today owing to an article that was on the front page of MSN for a while today. ‘The 11 lamest blogs on the Internet‘ originally appeared on a website called ‘PC World’ (not the shop we have in the UK) a week or two ago.

I’ve been busy moderating comments – in fact today was the first time I’ve moderated the comments on the site since I moved it onto its own domain at dullestblog.com, so there were about 1800 to do. [Uninteresting aside: 1800 is too many comments for WordPress to display all at once, so I had to use cunning means involving searches for spam words to weed out a lot of the spams several hundred at a time. All terribly tricky, I can tell you.]

Anyway, the dullest blog should now accept comments. It is odd that it is getting all of this attention nearly six years on. I am, by the way, thinking about putting a webpage together that will link to all of the various websites that I run in some way or other, as there does seem to be quite a lot of them now and there isn’t a page that links to all of them. I’ve even got a few yet-to-be launched websites milling around in the background in various states of non-completion. I did have a ‘portfolio’ website but it is out of date and doesn’t work, two reasons not to look at it.

Posted by Dave at 8:57 pm on December 2, 2008 and filed under Blogging.

10 Comments

I have written 7 ‘notes’ on Facebook during the last month, which the website owners consider ‘abuse’ as they have blocked me from posting any more. I had been using a facility whereby when you write blog posts they are imported into Facebook as notes, but it is obviously intended only for very occasional users. The help page:

Unfortunately, Facebook cannot provide any specifics on the rate limits that we enforce. Please know, however, that the speed at which you are acting and the sheer number of actions you have made are both taken into account.

It is true that when I was updating this blog daily my notes were at the rate of about one a day. Perhaps I am being disciplined retrospectively.

As punishment for the sheer number of my sins my Facebook notemaking powers have been removed and the red ‘you’ve been naughty’ sign above pops up to remind me of my guilt whenever I try to look as notes that anyone else has written. As an additional reprimand notes from others do not show up in my feed at all.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to everyone for the misery that my excessive notemaking has obviously caused. I will, in order to spare everyone further unhappiness, refrain from posting any more notes from this day onwards. Assuming i can work out how to turn them off of course.

Posted by Dave at 5:23 pm on October 9, 2008 and filed under Blogging, Technical.

30 Comments

Today I will be writing blog posts ‘live’ from the CRE in Esher, Surrey. You can follow my progress on the Church Times Blog.

Posted by Dave at 7:17 am on May 13, 2008 and filed under Blogging, Church Times blog, Religion.

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I’m at the Spring Harvest evangelical holiday camp for much of the coming week, and will be keeping a diary on my Church Times blog.

In the meantime please forgive the lack of posts and delays in comment moderation on this site.

Update:

• Spring Harvest: Day 2
• Spring Harvest: Day 3
• Spring Harvest: Day 4

Posted by Dave at 10:14 am on April 5, 2008 and filed under Blogging, Festivals and Exhibitions, Religion.

6 Comments

The BBC has issued a set of guidelines for its employees on blogging. The general message seems to be ‘talk to your line manager’. This guidance is part of a wider set of guidelines covering social networking and the internet and things like that.

There are also editorial guidelines on the subject of religion, which say, among other things:

Comedy and satire always have the potential for offence.

Indeed. I should probably issue a blanket apology every now and then just to be on the safe side.

Sorry everyone.

Posted by Dave at 12:04 am on March 21, 2008 and filed under Blogging, Religion.

7 Comments