Stranraer Museum exhibition: Toons in Oor Toon

The Art of Drawing is a fantastic exhibition of cartoon drawings from local children and national artists now showing at Stranraer museum

Stranraer Museum challenged the local community and primary schools to design and draw cartoon characters and comic strips to display in an exhibition. The challenge was extremely well received with over 130 school pupils attending cartoon workshops at the museum from Belmont, Rephad, Kirkcolm, Drummore and St Ninian’s Primary Schools.

We also had work submitted by some talented individual young artists working in the region. The chance to have their work displayed alongside professional artists was quite a unique opportunity and was clearly a great motivator for this exhibition. Hopefully, this will inspire these budding young artists to follow along the professional path. The results of this hard work and amazing imagination can be seen in this creative and colourful exhibition.

To complement this exhibition Stranraer Museum put out this call to professional cartoonists only last weekend:

I am a museum curator with responsibility for Stranraer Museum in South West Scotland. I apologise for contacting you cold but we have a dilemma at the Museum which I hope will interest you.

We have developed an exhibition called ‘The Art of Drawing’. Its focus has been on the more modern styles of drawing; manga and cartoon illustrations. The idea is to inspire young people to take part and for artists and audiences to recognise and enjoy these forms as quality works in their own right. We have very successfully inspired children with workshops and events through the winter and spring and have received many works for display in a variety of styles, but we are without the aspirational element of the exhibition and we are desperate to prove to these budding artists that their passion is one that they could take into adult life.

Here is my request; could you supply one piece free of charge we could exhibit alongside these works? The rub is that the exhibition opens on Saturday 3 May (sorry) so we would need something that you could send us now. We are happy to receive a digital version to display either in digital format or to print in whatever form you wish.

The response was amazing. The Museum was overwhelmed by the generosity of professional cartoonists. People who had no obligation to provide any artwork and people the Museum could not afford to pay. In three days they had 17 artists willing to donate work to the museum including the co-creator of Bananaman and illustrator on the Beano, a cartoonist who worked on Dangermouse and one of the few Scottish-based cartoon and caricature companies. This is mostly thanks to Nathan Ariss who posted the above letter on the procartoonists blog so special thanks go to him. But Stranraer Museum would like to publicly thank Mike Argent, Chris Altham, Ian Baker, Rupert Besley, Steve Bright, Chris Madden, Noel Ford, Tim Harries, Malc McGookin, Peter Nesbit, Matt Percival, Royston Robertson, Bill Stott, The Surreal McCoy, Colin whittock and the Scottish Cartoons Art Studio.

The exhibition runs from 3 May to 7 June. Open Monday to Friday 10-5 and Saturday 10-1 & 1.30-4.30. Admission Free.