Make Insurance Funny

Quite a challenge I'm sure you'll agree.

These drawings were for an Insurance company who specialise in "high net worth individuals". They support the winner of the Young Cartoonist award each year by commissioning a drawing for their marketing material. A lot of the previous winners had set their cartoons in stately homes, so I wanted to steer clear of that and produce some cartoons in more unusual settings. Below are the 8 sketches I sent them, followed by the final cartoon based on the “Small Print” sketch. I hope you like them.

Cambridge Science Festival Badges

I designed these badges for the Cambridge Science Festival. They're for the Institute for Manufacturing (where I work).

Punishment

So, I've decided to follow Mr Rowson's advice and come up with more of my own cartoons. This series of cartoons was inspired by my friend Matthew's Facebook status update. We both love a good pun (I may add more later):

Bloody Students

I really enjoyed drawing this cartoon for TCS. The brief was to illustrate an article entitled "Do Arts students have an inferiority complex?". Having spent some time both at the Royal College of Art and the Physics department here in Cambridge, I had a good idea of the stereotypical students I wanted to draw. The geek is wearing a shirt with the phrase "All your base are belong to us" written on it - see here for an explanation.

This week I met with cartoonist Martin Rowson to discuss my work - a real privilege. He was great and made some suggestions about who I might want to contact and what direction I should take my work in. He also got me incredibly drunk so I should probably use the experience as the subject of a cartoon. Watch this space.

Dr Strangelove

This week I only did one cartoon for an article about Dr Strangelove. I drew the bomb dropping on Cambridge of course :-)

I've just realised I should have drawn this guy as an academic waving a motar board. Oh well - might redraw it one day.

Loved Up

This week TCS asked me to produce an A3 colour illustration for their magazine section “The Bridge” for Valentine’s Day. They originally asked me to produce a Banksy-esque stencil drawing of a student kissing a lecturer, but I didn’t fancy copying somebody else’s style. Instead I suggested that I draw a scene featuring a selection of unlikely Cambridge couples who had just dropped whatever they were doing and kissing, which they liked. The final illustration took a long time to produce, and it perhaps is a little less colourful than I was hoping – especially in news print – but overall I’m pleased with it.

I was also asked to do a cartoon of somebody taking Valentine's Day too seriously (I think I know someone who would actually do this).

Finally I was asked to do a caricature of Nick Clegg to accompany an article about student tuition fees. Apparently somebody commented that he must be either stupid, mad or malicious to support the government’s policy. I’ve just realised this is my first attempt at a ‘political’ cartoon – I’ll leave it to you decide if I’ve been successful. They didn’t print it in the end which didn’t come as a great shock.

Useless Punts

Not a lot to show this week because I’ve been working on a paid commission. I submitted this punt cartoon to TCS but they printed my strict parent cartoon from last week instead. I hope they find room for it next week because I’m really pleased with it. I’m wondering if these ‘series’ cartoons are emerging as a bit of a theme in my work. I enjoy playing about with the composition of these drawings whilst making sure they read well.