Teams of participants from the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation who run Bloghorn will be participating in the annual Big Draw next weekend. Cartoonists Clive Goddard, Andy Bunday, Pete Dredge and Nathan Ariss will be representing the trade in the Battle of the Cartoonists. Colleagues Tim Harries, and Cathy Simpson will also be a running a series of workshops for visitors at the Idea Generation gallery in central London.

UPDATED: 9th September 2009 11.30am. You can also find details of the lots for auction here

In our final talk with artist of the month Kate Scurfield, we asked what she thought about the future of cartooning in the digital age.

E-mail has revolutionised delivery of images, although some editors (young ones) have used it to shorten deadlines. I believe as broadband speeds improve, the system will permit more elaborate websites for cartoonists including animation which is our greatest marketing tool.

My concern lies with plagiarism and electronic copying of our work. We can only reasonably protect our work in the UK and an increasing amount of my work goes overseas. I feel we are always playing catch up with the computer nerds and one day someone will sell a clever tool to remove watermarks at the flick of a switch. I have personally suffered from copyists both here and overseas and it is potentially a big threat. Artists have to think of a better way of protecting their work from being copied.

I dream of owning a Mac and a graphics pad and dig pen, but I will never give up drawing on watercolor paper and using a paintbrush.

Our thanks to Kate and look out for a new Artist of the Month for July next Friday.

No39. published in June 2009 – cover artwork this month is by Steve Bell.

The Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation of the UK publishes the Foghorn six times a year and you may subscribe to a glossy, printed version for a mere £30 by contacting us at this mail link here.

You can download a recent issue as a pdf file to see what it’s all about from here. Please add anything you want to share about what you find in the comments underneath this post.

Inside this issue;
Chris Madden introduces us to a Wallace you may be unfamiliar with.
Tim Harries wonders where all the stylophones went.
The Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival preview offers a plethora of cartoony goodness.
Wilbur Dawbarn gets scientific.
The Foghorn guide to Evolution raises a few eyebrows.
And Pete Dredge takes on Horne and Corden.

Subscribe to our six editions a year print copy from here. Or, try a look at (or download) previous issues here.

Bloghorn freebie: Spot on

Win a pair of tickets to an evening of cartoon, caricature and graphic satire with Posy Simmonds, Steve Bell and Bill Feaver at Kings Place in London.

All you have to do is impress Bloghorn by making the best addition to the following proposition in the comments underneath this post;

Posy Simmonds excels at storytelling because…

If you would rather not post publicly, you can email Bloghorn with your line – please put Posy Simmonds in the title line of your email.

Bloghorn will pick the lucky winner of the pair of tickets on Friday at noon.

Posy, Steve and Bill are talking on Monday 6th April, at 7pm at Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG. The nearest Tube station is Kings Cross and Kings Place is 5 minutes walk north on York Way close to Crinan Street.

Cut and paste the N1 9AG postcode into the search Google maps for the exact location.
Google Maps

Win or don’t quite win this time, tickets are also available online for £9.50 at Kings Place.

Chichi Parish finds out what happens when burlesque meets art school at Dr Sketchy’s.
Chris Madden gets scientific for Valentine’s with “Love is a drug.’’
Clive Collins goes a bit historical with “Don’t mention the War.”
Do you know how to spot a “David Low’’ forgery? If not, subscribe to this magazine.
Pete Dredge takes on TV cookery shows in “The Critic”
Roger Penwill turns his gaze to windows in “Buildings in the Fog’’
Plus the usual features, and an extra large helping of jokes.

Following on from Bloghorn’s earlier post that mentioned Scott McCloud’s concept of the Infinite Canvas, it has transpired that Microsoft has released a working demo of a piece of software called (imaginatively enough) Infinite Canvas that allows the cartoonist to tell a story in a way that is unencumbered by the traditional boundaries of the printed page.

In a nutshell, this means that the comic can proceed continuously left to right. Or up and down. Or indeed, diagonally across the screen, forking off at random points, reconnecting with other points in the story or even just crossing it. The comic can be advanced by clicking a frame at a time, or by moving the mouse around, or by zooming out to see the whole strip. Or many, many other possible transitions. The possibilities are, well, infinite…

At the moment, details are sketchy. You’ll need JavaScript turned on in your browser, but you probably have that already. There are a number of sample strips up on the demonstration site, including The Day the Saucers Came by Neil Gaiman (of Sandman and Stardust fame) and Brad’s Somber Mood by Scott McCloud. You can even create your own – I’ve had a quick play myself: The Five Stages of a Blogger’s Life (via the Online Journalism Blog). The tools are a little crude at the moment, but this is a work in progress, and could hold great potential for the future.

(via D’log)

The reader’s editor at The Guardian news organisation writes in response to critical correspondence about some of cartoonist Steve Bell’s editorial cartoons.

Nathan Ariss tells Bloghorn what and who makes him laugh in the last of our posts about him and his work:

I admire any stand-up or sit-down comedian who can actually make me laugh as I’m quite a tough audience. I enjoy clever, quick-witted jokes, but I can also go for gentle, human, observational stuff and even the lightest of whimsy (so long as it’s delightful). I love the strength and simplicity of purely visual – “silent” – comedy and revel in surreal, lateral and blatantly absurd cartoons, because I think I must be really smart to “get” them.

A simple name-check of artists would have me list Quentin Blake, for sheer freedom of line and overall life-affirming execution; early Searle, (particularly Molesworth and St. Trinian’s), and Thelwell both for their superb techniques for what is, in essence, simply getting black on white. Hargreaves for required lessons in describing movement; David Low’s war cartoons; Posy Simmonds, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Charles Ardizzone, David Gentlemen and Chris Orr, variously, for illustration; Mort Drucker and David Stoten for characterisation; Liberatore’s RanXerox, Manfred Deix and Terry Gilliam for grotesques; Don Martin, Gary Larson, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Hunt Emerson, Frank Cotham, “Bud” Handelsman and Holte, all for various style and cartoon services rendered; and finally, nearly everyone I can think of with that casual, “free-line” feel: Scarfe, Steadman, Larry, Tidy, Hoffnung, Bretecher, Husband, Lowry, Feiffer, Sorrel, and Myers, not to mention more than a few of the artists currently frequenting the membership pages of the PCO.

Not content with Nathan’s efforts to answer this question, Bloghorn ruthlessly asked him how he sees the future of cartooning in the digital age:

I tend to believe that the future is full of unexplored possibilities and is not one automatically to be feared. Yes, these are serious times for humourists, but I am determined to remain positive about the prospects for the arts in general, no matter how impoverished and altered the markets may become. Cartooning, it seems to me, is the last remaining art form which is not recognised as such, and I believe that the next decade will see a better appreciation and understanding develop for the craft in its own right. There are some exceptional talents currently working in this country, and who knows? We may just have entered a glorious new age of the modern cartoonist.

Bloghorn thanks Nathan for his thoughts over the past four weeks and promises a new artist of the month next Friday. Please come back to find out who it will be.

Dan Wasserman at the Boston Globe writes about the writer and long-time admirer of cartoon and comic art here.

As previously covered on the Bloghorn, Updike was one of many well-known public figures who dabbled in cartooning but found they lacked the full set of skills necessary to survive in its competitive world.