Happy Incredibly Belated New Year everyone.

News:

1. I have been continuing with my activities.
2. I joined the Professional Cartoonists Association. I have a profile here. I intend to be more professional from now on.
3. A new website on its way. It will be for non-church-related cartoons.
4. An upgrade to this website is on its way. There will be some improvements.
5. A relaunch of my licence system is on its way. There will be some improvements.
6. I have been beset with problems (technical). Problem a: inability to make any printer / scanner work using my main computer (Mac). Problem b: I tried to make my mobile telephone take photographs in pure black and white (no grey like the one above) and failed. Problem c: My cascading style sheets are in a knot.
7. I still don’t really have anywhere to go and work during cartooning days (diagram above) but I have learnt to deal with this.
8. I was going to learn to make newspapers, but it didn’t happen.
9. New year’s resolution: to draw in notebook every day. There have been quite a few days when I have not failed at this.
10. It is dull when people say they intend to blog more, but I do. There may be some shorter updates with less academic depth, etc.

Church Times. This week I’m back in the paper with some illustrations for a feature on church small groups, and these drawings are also on the cover (above – or a bit bigger here). My Guide to the Church cartoon isn’t there this week (still that blessed office picture), but should be from next week onwards.

Thanks to all of the people who have encouraged me in various ways in recent weeks. Not been the best of times – I’d like to say more, but… [*rewrites repeatedly*] I can’t bring myself to do so here, what with people reading and everything.

Place to work. I know I’ve said this before, but I still need somewhere to do things for 2-3 days a week. Within reasonable travelling distance by railway (from Laindon station) would be ideal. With other people preferably. Offices, churches, towers, sheds, hovels – all fine. As would some combination – a tower of offices or a church hovel spring to mind.

Bit of a break. Whilst I’m cartooning again I may not be actually around much on the internet (Twitter etc) for a while. I think you’ll be OK.

Not a lot more to say than that at the moment, but I thought I’d pass on the information.

I’m selling five cartoon canvasses. They are the final five that I own that I drew to be exhibited at the Lambeth Conference in 2008 (all of the others were disposed of by various means or given to Archbishops).

The five cartoons are as follows (images at the end of this post):

1. Bishops’ meetings (original cartoon) Start price: £20 + £10 P&P (UK only)
2. How Christians can work together across the divide (original cartoon) Start price: £20 + £10 P&P (UK only)
3. Ordinary Anglicans (original version not currently available unless to are a Church Times subscriber – see here) Start price: £20 + £10 P&P (UK only)
4. The church kitchen (original cartoon) Start price: £29.99 + £10 P&P (UK only)
5. The peace (original cartoon) Start price: £29.99 + £10 P&P (UK only)

The auctions are on Ebay UK and will run for 10 days, so will end on the evening of Thursday 29 September.

The canvasses themselves are originals in the sense that I drew them, but they are not the original originals in that they had already been drawn on paper for the Church Times, etc. They have been stored since 2008 and are not in absolutely perfect condition (sample blemish), but they are pretty good. I’m happy to sign on the front if required, and/or sign with an inscription on the frame on the back. I will write your choice of words but reserve the right to edit text (always have to say that now…).

All funds raised by these auctions will go towards the work of Esuubi, a charity working with children in Uganda. Read more about it here and follow on Twitter here: @esuubi. I’m very pleased to say that a special fund at my church, St John’s and St Mary’s Langdon Hills, will match the money raised by these auctions.

Click ‘read a bit more’ to see the images in more detail.

1. Bishops’ meetings (original cartoon / detail of canvas)

2. How Christians can work together across the divide (original cartoon / detail of canvas)

3. Ordinary Anglicans (original version not currently available unless to are a Church Times subscriber – see here / detail of canvas)

4. The church kitchen (original cartoon / detail of canvas)

5. The peace (original cartoon / detail of canvas)

Each of my usual cartoons takes me approximately a day to do. This includes thinking, talking to people, honing the idea, pacing up and down, thinking of a layout that works, wrestling with the exact wording, researching how things look (I know, you wouldn’t have thought it), having a crisis and deciding I am giving up cartooning for ever, pencilling, inking in, scanning, and finally editing on the computer. Any other professional cartoonists reading this will be amazed that I make a living. Yes, I know.

The image above, on the other hand, took perhaps 30 seconds. I suppose it might have taken up to a minute, depending upon the frequency of seagulls. It is from a notebook of cartoons I was looking at this evening which I did a number of years ago. There are another 75 pages of drawings in the notebook, none of which have been scanned or seen by anyone other than my wife. Most of them will probably never will be seen by anyone else. There are a number of reasons for this. Many of them made sense in the context they were drawn but would make rather less sense to the general public now. But another reason is my fear of having less than perfect work seen by the world. I’m terrified that you might not like it. But in fact these days I have a fear of even doing less than perfect work – it is a long time since I did a notebook of spontaneous drawings like the one above.

This is something I need to get over. At the very least I need to start to draw more and have fun doing it. I have found, and I suspect I am not alone, that it becomes harder to have fun doing something once the stakes are higher and you are being paid for it. Some people manage it, but I find it very difficult. I’ve known this for years, but my hope is that by telling you about it I might be able to beat it.

This rather self-absorbed blog post really isn’t intended to be me digging for compliments or doing myself down, by the way. I know I can be good at what i do. I’d rather hear how you deal with anything similar, if you you do. How do you remain creative under pressure? How do you cope with the fear of [insert name of occupation here]. How does one draw a seagull*? That sort of thing.

* I will get into trouble from my ornithologist friends for using the word ‘seagull’, I know. Sorry.

Just a quick Monday morning cartoon from the notebook. If no-one has ever used this joke before I will be amazed.

Cartooning update: July is always a busy time of year as I am trying to get ahead of myself before taking a slight break, and some publications understandably need to bring deadlines forward for similar reasons. Also there are one or two Greenbelt Festival-related projects to be completed.

The move from CartoonChurch HQ is probably 12% completed, which is quite good progress all things considered. Part of the task is to make room in our house for all of my cartooning paraphernalia, and I have completed at least 16% of this task. I still have some office furniture and nick-nacks to get rid of (only got rid of 18% so far), and will, at some point, post some photographs here.

As always any cartoon subject requests will be considered very gladly should any be posted here or sent to me.

This is a highly irritating photograph showing a glimpse of today’s ‘Verger’s store cupboard’ cartoon in progress. Irritating, in that you can’t see the finished article – Church Times subscribers can do so here. But don’t worry, it will appear on this website or in a book in due course.

From this picture (larger version) you will also be able to glean certain information – that I am currently using an Artline 0.5 pen, I use a ruler, I make notes, and my desk is a fake wood kind of colour. Earth shattering. I have changed pens in recent months by the way – the first five years of Church Times cartoons were done using a fibre tip (Papermate Nylon), which is still a pen I use a lot. The ruler is to make sure that things are level, and where they need to be, centred. I prefer not to use the proper equipment, ie any sort of drawing board, for this.

This is the post-pencilling and just beginning to ink stage. The hard work, ideas and drawing it in, has been completed. I start off the inking process with the lettering on this kind of picture as everything has to fit around it. Some of the lettering will be adjusted later on on the computer though. I will invariably spell words like ‘door’ or ‘books’ incorrectly.

Please don’t alert any other cartoonists to this blog post – my methods are archaic and I would be laughed out of town if anyone knew the way I go about things. Actually, come to think of it, I quite like the idea of being laughed out of town. If you see me in town please laugh me out of it.

ENDS

The author copies of my 2012 calendar arrived yesterday, which means that they are available for the incredibly organised to buy. The calendar is a bit different to previous years, in that instead of new material it contains 12 of my favourite ‘Guide to the Church’ cartoons. I have hand-picked them, which means I chose them without using any kind of mechanical device. Some of the diagrams are in the books, but some of them have not appeared anywhere else but the Church Times. I’m sorry that there aren’t new cartoons this time around, but I’m hoping that a collection of some of my best pictures will still make it a good thing to give as a present, etc.

The Canterbury Press (they are my publishers) page about the calendar is here, a similar looking one from Church House Bookshop is here, and the Amazon UK page is here. I’d recommend ordering it through your local Christian Bookshop if you can. Go in and have a chat with them while you are about it. If you are a shop why not talk to Canterbury Press about stocking it?

As I do mainly cartoons I will describe the cartoon creation process in a diagram and then broken into stages:

These are the stages I go through when doing a cartoon. I will say more about them another time.

Thinking of the idea
This is the most difficult part. If you mess this up the whole thing will be a disaster.

Doing a rough version
This is the most tricky aspect. If you botch this up the whole thing will be a fiasco.

Pencilling it in
This is the most challenging phase. If you muck this up the whole thing will be a catastrophe.

Inking it in
This is the most demanding stage. If you foul this up the whole thing will be a calamity.

Scanning it and editing it using the computer
This is the most arduous step. If you bungle this up the whole thing will be a debacle.

Report from cartoon talk: The crowd was really quite small, but people seemed to quite enjoy themselves and everyone was kind and lovely. All in all a very good evening. The preparation didn’t go terribly well though – nothing at all to do with the fact that I didn’t get on with doing it early enough. Anyone following me on Twitter yesterday will have heard me moaning about my computers, which really didn’t behave well (dull technical details below), but I’m sure it is just me being inept in one way or another. I really enjoy the actual talking, but the lack of functioning technology and the fact it takes me forever to prepare means that I have no further plans for more public lectures at the moment.

Sorry not to have done anything visible with your marvellous questions yet. I am intending to do so soon.

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[Incredibly boring technical details: Using OpenOffice Impress because it means I can switch between PC and Mac. Unfortunately the normal very reliable OpenOffice (it might be called something else now) doesn't work well when it comes to creating presentations with large numbers of images. On the PC the pictures kept dropping out of the presentation for no reason whatsoever, whilst on the Mac you can't just drag in the image icons like you can on the PC as it doesn't work. So there is lots of messing around trying to get the images in and drag them into being the right size and being central, and my Mac can't cope. The Mac is a lovely computer to use in many ways, but very often falls down on the details. Give me file sizes when I search for an image so I know which is the high res version, for goodness sake. Sorry, nearly began to rant there. I know, lots of you think I should switch to Linux or somesuch, but I don't have the time and energy to do such a thing at the moment. Using Keynote means (I think) that, having no Mac laptop, I'd have a problem being compatible with church computers in the places I go to do these things.]