Matt Buck's Hack Cartoons

A short video on a technology for looking at digital images. It's impressive stuff.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

In this photograph I am precisely halfway through a large drawing about drawing at the Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

A cartoonist tries to think.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

I am not usually one to over-praise the thinking of government, or at least, those bits of it which are passed down to us, the great unwashed. However, MP Tom Watson has researched, written and spoken something about the way conversational communication may come to work in the digital world, which is worth a read of anyone's time.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

A report on the digital information revolution of the past decade. My own miniscule part in it can be seen courtesy of the amazing Wayback machine.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

From Nick Davies via Lloyd Shepherd and the UKPG. I am indulging in pure churnalism here, but this bit is worth it because the original source, is original.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

From the Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk. Well worth a watch.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

"The rise of blogging and opinion outside of the mainstream has caused newspapers a problem, because quite often these blogs are more interesting than the editorials in the newspapers."
Former editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neill to the House of Lords Communications Committee. Quote via Journalism.co.uk

More cheerfully, The Independent newspaper has relaunched, at long last, its website, In doing so, it has finally recognised the genius of its regular editorial cartoonist, Dave Brown. He has a proper cartoon gallery full of marvellous stuff, right at the top of opinion. The joke for December the 24th is a particular treat.
23rd January 2008

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

’Tis the season to draw daft ecards...mind you, I did get to do kazoos...one of which could even be desribed as flirtatious.
19th December 2007

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

...coming soon...

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

Sometimes you just hear about something completely cheerful. In this case it's that a friend of mine, Gareth Negus, is now running the oldest, purpose-built and continually running cinema in the world. You can find out about the Curzon cinema in Clevedon, near Bristol, here. The history of the place and the battle to keep it alive is a fantastic story about what groups of people can do when they try. There's also a natty piece of simple and creative interactivity which allows the virtual visitor a sneak look at this marvellous old place of mass entertainment. Have a look! Long may it and Gareth thrive.
17th December 2007

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

I get a lot of letters from younger cartoonists and people who make pictures for a living, asking for advice. Once upon a time I used to write these letters myself. I try to answer them, but to be honest, there isn't a great deal of useful stuff you can say. If the author has desire to draw real-life it will come out anyway, with outside advice or not. We all have a talent for expressing ourselves in varying degrees. However, the one consistent thing I always say, is to learn the economic, legal and financial value of what is made with their skill. This is because, sadly, life and some people being what they are, you will undoubtedly find your work and ideas are, at some point, 'borrowed.' The trick at this point is in being to take the backhanded compliment. This last bit of this process is a bit like a finishing school for makers of creativity. It's happened to me several times in the past decade and will no doubt happen again. There's a good quotation by an Indian gentleman caled Ananda K.Coomaraswamy about it.

It's not a question of an artist being a special kind of person, but of every person, who is not an parasite or an idler, being a special kind of artist.

Absolutely lovely. A wonderful combination of pictures, music, production and design. This was made by somebody called Miralaum. A hat-tip to Wiley Miller for spotting it. the full list of featured commercial artists for 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art. is;
Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli , Boltraffio, Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Messina, Perugino, Hans Memling, El Greco, Hans Holbein, Rokotov, Peter Paul Rubens, Gobert, Caspar Netscher, Pierre Mignard, Jean-Marc Nattier, Vigee-Le Brun, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Winterhalter, Tyranov, Borovikovsky, Venetsianov, Gros, Kiprensky, Amalie, Corot, Edouard Manet, Flatour, Ingres, Wontner, Bouguereau, Comerre, Leighton, Blaas, Renoir, Millias, Duveneck, Cassatt, Weir, Zorn, Mucha, Paul Gaugan, Henri Matisse, Picabia, Gustav Klimt, Hawkins, Magritte, Salvador Dali, Malevich, Merrild, Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso.
Not bad really.
2nd December 2007

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

From the BBC
Requires Flash player.

In the spirit of the marvellous hypertext video, which you can find below, comes this. Hat-tip to Mindy McAdams but the creative kudos belongs to Michael Wesch.

26th October 2007

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

This is excellent news. Hello again Ian.
23rd October 2007
Matt Buck’s animated drawings

The problems with making jokes post below, touches on another interesting post from Virtual Economics in which Seamus McCauley talks about the increasing fusion between factual and opinion-based news coverage. This is very interesting to someone like me because essentially it's what visual satirists do; try to reveal truths, or opinions, through analogy, visual symbolism and jokes.

Seamus uses a lovely phrase in his piece - the genuine value of satirical news reporting - and goes on to talk about how one of the major problems that today's conventional journalists are finding, is that the predominant industry business models no longer support what it is, journalists do. In this context he argues, the value of satire, goes up.

'The gap between news and news satire gets ever smaller, and it seems our understanding of current affairs is all the richer for it.'

Sincere hat-tip to Mr McCauley

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

This picture of a journalism college class from the University of Missouri is sort of wonderful and sort of terrifying, all at the same time. It's certainly a testament to the power of effective brand marketing. A hat-tip to the Silicon Valley Sleuth.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

I never feel like I need an excuse to watch this fantastic piece of visual story-telling again...kudos to the director, Professor Wesch

Google recently signed business deals with four major providers of information to newspapers all around the globe.

This has, potentially, very major implications for all existing print media. The news gathered at source does not have to go through the existing media structures to get to market (the readers). Why would anyone bother to read a paper when you can get the unfiltered content direct from your contact with a search engine?

Hat-tip to Matthew Ingram who writes about it here