Get your entries ready for the 6th Cheltenham Illustration Awards!

This year we have teamed up with the world famous Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. They want the stories, illustrations and narratives you create to link to their "Amulets and Charms" collection. Visit the Museum if you can, but if it's too far away, you can access a virtual tour of the museum here, or their Amulets info page here. Visit the Awards site for more information.

Stop Press: Acclaimed illustrator and cartoonist Tom Gauld has just agreed to be our main judge of the 2012 Awards!

Above: The now regular appearance of the Pittville Press stand at Angouleme was a great success. Students who visit this huge international Festival of all things drawn, comic and graphic are always blown away by the size and scope of the exhibition that spreads all over this beautiful French town every January. We are the only UK Illustration course to be granted the privilege of exhibiting (there is a strict selection process) and it's a chance to meet the very top names in international graphic novel, manga and comic book authorship today.

Above: At the Cheltenham Illustration Awards in October 2011, the speakers were Biografiktion, a young self-publishing comics collective from Germany, Anne Howeson, acclaimed artist, illustrator and tutor at the RCA, and Paul Gravett, graphic novel expert. Pictured is Till Hafenbrak giving an illustrated talk on Biografiktion's process and practice.

Below: Sam Arthur of Nobrow Press gives a talk at the 2010 Awards Symposium.

Above: Jamie's winning entry for the 2010 Cheltenham Illustration Awards.

Sara Fanelli was the judge.

Below: Illustration Course Leader Kieren Phelps

leads a discussion on graphic novels at the 2009 Cheltenham Literature Festival