We will be publishing artwork submitted for exhibition at this year’s cartoon festival in the run up to the main weekend on April 16th and 17th.

Bloghorn Shrewsbury 2011 Olympics cartoon © Chris Madden

This year’s events have an Olympian theme and the show Personal Bests will be highlighting some of the cartoonists responses to this challenge.

Bloghorn Shrewsbury 2011 Olympics cartoon © Andy Davey cartoon

For those local to the town, the show is opening 11th April at the Bear Steps Gallery.

Bloghorn Shrewsbury Olympic cartoon 2011 © Matthew Buck Hack Cartoons

Bloghorn can announce the full line up of attending Cartoonists for the 2011 Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival.
More than 40 of the finest cartoonists from the UK are this year joined by Graeme Keyes, Tom Matthews, Jim Cogan, Tom Halliday and Jon Berkeley our guests from Ireland.

Three cartoon exhibitions – Joking for Gold by Giles – Personal Bests – and Give us a Sporting Chance open next week in the town and the Smile-A-Thon Trail will lead visitors from venue to venue.

Ian Ellery, Andy Gilbert, Angela Martin and Paul Hardman will be running the free drawing workshops while Jacky Fleming and Chichi Parish will be playing script doctors in a series of Cartoon Clinics. (Get the details on our map.)

And after all the drawing education Gill Hudson , Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest, along with Martin Colyer, the magazine’s Design Director, and Steve Way, Cartoon Editor, will be offering an advice session for aspiring artists called What Makes a Good Cartoon? and Cath Tate will talk about Getting Published.

© John Roberts

Caricaturists Alex Hughes, Tim Leatherbarrow, John Roberts and Helen Martin will be plying their skills in the Square alongside The Big Boards.

And this is where you’ll find Bill Stott, Pete Dredge, Steve Bright, Martin Honeysett, Matt Buck (Hack Cartoons), Royston Robertson, The Surreal McCoy, Robert Duncan, Rosie Brooks, Cathy Simpson, Janis Goodman, Clive Goddard, Nathan Ariss and Steve Best all of whom will be making enormous cartoons over the course of Friday and Saturday.

Dr Nick Hiley from the British Cartoon Archive will be talking about his day job of saving great art for the nation while Andy Davey of The Sun and Peter Schrank of The Independent will be going head-to-head over matters of contemporary news and politics.

We can‘t disclose what the the script of the  live Melodrawma is but we understand Roger Penwill, Bill Stott, Noel Ford and Pete Dredge will all be involved.

Bloghorn has made a handy Shrewsbury calendar to help you plan your way around the events of the weekend of 16th and 17th April. It should go nicely with our map.

It will be a packed weekend with a lively and growing fringe of unofficial events and many other visiting artists. If you are planning to come along, please let us know in the comments.

Shrewsbury Tourism can help you out with advice on accomodation and transport. Bloghorn says see you there.

The 2011 Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival is almost upon us and  visitors can expect a packed weekend of activities in the heart of the medieval town.

The main event weekend is April 16th-17th but many shows and exhibitions open in advance  and Bloghorn has attached details to this handy map.

Enlarge the map

The festival has been running since 2004. Please click here to scroll back through some of last year’s activities.

Bloghorn and the membership of the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation are long time collaborators with the Festival, the local council and its commercial sponsors.

The UK Press Gazette reports today that the Mirror Group Newspapers have signed Simon Tofield, creator of internet cartoon sensation, Simon’s Cat to bring his regular cartoon feature to their products.

There is an interview with the four cat owning cartoonist in the Mirror here. You can also hear the man speaking in this video from the British International Comics Show of last autumn.

Bloghorn offers congratulations to Simon on the excellent news. It’s particularly good to see an internet cartoon finding its way back into a traditional market – and benefitting from its relationship with both forms of publishing.

One of Bloghorn’s regular contributors, Royston Robertson has a cartoon in a rather unusual exhibition. The Great Wall of Ramsgate is a 1000ft-long temporary wall that’s been erected around the site of an old amusement park during redevelopment. In an effort to brighten it up a bit, local artists, photographers and cartoonists have been invited to add their own contribution, in the shape of a series of 4ft by 8ft boards.

Royston’s no stranger to working on such a large scale, having drawn for the Big Boards at Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival in 2007 and 2008, and was on the team representing Bloghorn at this year’s Battle of the Cartoonists. Keep your eye on Bloghorn for news on the cartoonists who’ll be Big Boarding at this year’s Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival in April.

Martin Rowson, who produced one of last years Big Boards at Shrewsbury, will be speaking at the Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, London W2 1QJ next week on the subject of Caricatures and Commentary. Tickets are available for the event on Tuesday 1st February, 7-9pm, priced £12.50 (£10 for early birds, £8 for concessions) here.

As the pencil of 2010 contacts the eraser of 2011, Bloghorn thought it was time to record some of the year’s highs and lows – and to speculate about the new year.

But first, news of a PRIZE competition which will be coming on Bloghorn over the New Year Bank Holiday weekend … so watch this space.

© Ray Lowry cartoons The Clash

You can explore our full monthly archives of stories from the world of UK cartooning in 2010 at: January - February - March – April – May - June – July – August – September – October – November and December.

Team Bloghorn with the banner at the 2010 Battle of the Cartoonists

As you can see it’s been a packed show, featuring a fantastic Ray Lowry retrospective, above, at the Idea Generation Gallery, mixed with the odd rotten moment like losing Les Gibbard. We have had the fantastic highlights of our traditional events such as the Big Draw and Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival and, happily, the late great Alan Coren rose from the grave and provided  a shot of welcome wisdom.

After that we played Draw and Fold Over before reading a freshly minted copy of Foghorn magazine. What? You haven’t yet subscribed to six issues a year for only £20? Kindly do so here, now.

The promised appearance of The House of Illustration in London has long cheered many as this will be a sister organisation to our long-time favourite The Cartoon Museum, which lies close to the proposed new attraction at King’s Cross in London. The £6.5m fundraising target is stiff but site building has started and you can read more about the full plans here. Meanwhile, the crew at The Cartoon Museum excelled themselves with a fine range of shows and events, excelling with a fantastic Ronald Searle display as the man reached his 90th birthday.

What’s the difference between cartooning and illustration Bloghorn hears you ask?

Try these definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, although we thinks Searle shows the interchangeability of the terms about as well as anyone.

Car-toon – noun
From the Italian cartone pasteboard, cartoon, augmentative of carta leaf of paper.

Ill-ust-rat-ion noun
Something that serves to illustrate: an example or instance that helps make something clear : a picture or diagram that helps make something clear or attractive.

Wikipedia has a definition here for print media which references Punch, the magazine which our former patron Alan Coren used to edit.

Happily, the past year has also seen terrific development in the way cartoons are being used in media and the possibilities, and markets will grow in the new year. We’ve got evidence below from The Times and its current TV advertising. You can find a link to the cartoon they are promoting lower down this article …

Of course, we work on non-mobile television too, check out the titles to the new BBC adaptation of Just William and bow to the pen of cartoonist Ed McLachlan.

You’ll find a fantastic selection of the UK’s finest cartoonists working in all forms of the art at our UK Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation portfolio site which we will also be updating during 2011.

On the site the new and less-and-less unusual Government can expect its usual share of drawn innovation and horror – try Strictly Coalition for a start. In similar fashion, we wrote disobliging things about some parts of the Arts Council England because they sometimes deserve it.

© Jonathan Pugh of The Daily Mail

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Forza Cartone!

Bloghorn is written, edited and maintained by Matthew Buck, Royston Robertson and Alex Hughes,  on behalf of the UK Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation. You can contact the team here.

The Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival doesn’t actually finish at the end of the weekend.

Exhibitions continue in venues across the town and organisers run workshops for people keen to explore the skills of drawing and communication.

Cartoonist Wilbur Dawbarn ran one of these events and here are photos from his workshops. Bloghorn thanks Shropshire Council’s event development team for passing these along to us.

Some of the work produced will be displayed at the town’s Wakeman School and Arts College at the end of June.

An informant tells Bloghorn that Wilbur let slip he sometimes “meditated” on a subject for a cartoon while having a lie-in in the mornings. One of the older ladies immediately produced a cartoon of him lounging in bed – you can see it below.

"It's nice to finish the day's work before breakfast!"

Bloghorn thinks: If only…

Bloghorn thanks the editorial writers of The Guardian for spotting what our members and many others do in working for the media, companies and individuals. Modesty prevents us from quoting the nice things said about the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (but do go and read them)!

The organisers of the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival would like us to add that the event is made possible by the kind, long-term support of Shropshire Council and the members of the PCO.

Festival patron, and friend of cartoonists, Libby Purves has words in The Times today for the Greek cartoonist guests at this year’s Shrewsbury. Sadly, they were prevented from actual attendance by unanticipated volcanic activity from the direction of Iceland.

Bloghorn has set up a Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival group at the Flickr photos site, to collect together pictures taken by cartoonists and by the visiting public.

There are dozens of great photos there already, so do take a look. And if you’ve got any great shots, please add them. Pictures will be moderated before appearing on the site.

Here’s the link: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bloghorn

A small but important addition to this year’s Shrewsbury Cartoon Festival is the exhibition of the completed Big Boards on the Sunday.

There is so much activity over the weekend that it’s easy to miss seeing some of the finished boards, but now the public get the chance to see this unique exhibition at their leisure on the Sunday.

The Bloghorn team, along with many other cartoonists and cartoon enthusiasts, have been taking loads of photos throughout the weekend. We’re in the process of getting them together online at Flickr. Expect to see many more throughout the week.

For a nice flavour of the Shrewsbury goings-on, see the piece written by festival patron Libby Purves in Saturday’s Times: Drawing the crowds.