Bill Jones

These cartoons have all been published in Private Eye.

I drew a regular page of rather patchy history for the Gloucestershire-based free children’s magazine Earwig magazine, now sadly defunct (or “Earwiggone” as they say in the world of earwigs …) Includes wordplay and puns.

Here are some illustrations that I drew for the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) bulletin as well as a design for a friend’s Distance Dining Club from 2020.

As well as Private Eye, my cartoons have appeared in Period Living and Poetry Review.

Illustrations to a Travel Journal written in 1872 by a Stroud grocer called Sidney Thornton, detailing a trip to Switzerland with his wife, sister-in-law and her husband.

This fascinating (and very charming) document is in the collection of the Museum in the Park in Stroud, which commissioned me to draw illustrations to go alongside excerpts of it when they were shared on social media in June 2020 (as a kind of armchair time-travel during the Lockdown).

The Journal (with more illustrations) can be read here.

This job was an absolute treat for me to do (combining my interest in Victorians and local and general history) but the nicest part of it was getting to know Sidney himself, who seemed a very personable man. (Thank you to Stroud Local History Society who provided me with extra information about him and his family.)

“The Obscured Object”, a mysterious comic strip I wrote at the end of the summer. But what is it?

A series of handy guides to growing Victorians, poets and gardeners in your garden. (Originally designed for gardening magazines, but currently unpublished.)

If you enjoy this sort of thing, I now give talks on the subject of Growing Victorians in Your Garden (and which incorporate some of the material shown here as well as lots of other props and jokes).

Please have a look at the section Talks about Growing Victorians in Your Garden for more information about these performances.

Some recent pictures done for fun, featuring my interest in corvids, Victorian clothing and melancholy.

I put my cartoon strip “Crow Jokes” and other cartoons about crows on Twitter where I am @hawkerspot . Here’s a selection.