I had a big professional milestone in the last week as a cartoonist.... I worked as a cartoonist for the Resilience Hub at COP 29 and I had to extend myself like never before. My task was to sit in six sessions run by the Resilience Hub and respond to each session by creating three cartoons which either highlighted 'elephants in the room' or captured ideas spoken about by the panellists.
I have been recently getting into graphic recording, where you listen deeply and record an event through words and pictures in real time, a real challenge for my brain. I found live cartooning even more challenging as you are not only listening deeply but you have to come up with separate ideas in your cartoons to display what is being said. I enjoyed the challenge, and learnt so much about my cartooning and commentary skills in the process. For example, I need to work on my single image cartoons, this is the traditional editorial cartoon format (like you see in newspapers) but I always have more to say and find the one-image-hot-take difficult.
Other difficulties: I had basically minimal preparation time and for some sessions, no information on the content apart from the title and a blurb. I did more than 20 cartoons over four days, 2 X sessions a day and sometimes at 10pm because of the time difference, sessions had very technical and diverse subject matter as well as language barriers and the challenges of working virtually / on zoom with dodgy internet (Azerbaijan's, not mine). I was pretty exhausted after all this brain work!
The cartoon which got the biggest reaction was the one I thought was the silliest - the fortune teller one. Apparently climate resilience civil engineers deal mostly with very dry data and were absolutely delighted to see their work reflected in a crystal ball?
Anyway, I feel super proud and pleased of the work I managed to do. Here are some of my favourite cartoons.
