About Cartoon Classroom.
Many of you who've visited this site will have noticed the
Cartoon Classroom link which has resided for some time on the left of the News page. It is no longer a pre-register site - it will now direct you to the live site of Cartoon Classroom, which was launched on the 3rd October.
I encourage you to register on it if you're a professional cartoonist/comic creator, or aspire to being such, or are interested in the study of cartoon art as a teacher or educationalist.
Cartoon Classroom is the inspiration of
Steve Marchant, a cartoonist and a teacher of cartooning, who began his tutoring career at
The London Cartoon Centre - a charity-run, full-time evening school of cartoon and comic art creation, which I was involved with for many years before it ran out of funding. Efforts to raise cash for it were continued until it became obvious the Centre could not be resurrected and continued for any worthwhile period. It then became a matter of deciding whether to return these donations to their source, or - at the permission of the donors - to use them to initiate something else that might generally help the cause the Centre espoused.
Steve decided that a good extension of the service the school once offered would be a website which had the main aim of centralising access to all the various means of studying cartoon and comic strip creation which exist throughout the UK and Southern Ireland.
The full list of its aims are as follows :
1) to put educational institutions in touch with cartoonists who teach this specialised art form on a part-time or full-time basis.
2 ) to document whatever is available through art colleges, workshops, recommended manuals and other media, which can help anyone studying to be a good cartoonist/comic creator.
3 ) to list all museums and galleries in its designated area which have comic/cartoon art on public view or in their archives, and to encourage those without any to acquire examples from local notable creators .
It's our intention that only a fraction of the information required for the site's operation will need to be supplied to the site by its administrators. Instead, details of courses, collections, locations and availability of tutoring will be added directly to the site by all those who use it. Ideally, it should be almost self-generating.
The most important thing for the site's effectiveness is that it offer comprehensive coverage of its target zone ; and for this to be achieved, we need to maximise our communication to all those institutions and individuals who'll make use of the site.
If you can, please help by contacting any person or institution you feel would add content to our database, and/or make use of it.
David Lloyd and
Steve Marchant.