The word ‘cartoon’ comes from the Italian cartone, which originally meant a preliminary drawing by an artist before creating a picture. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, would have drawn a large cartoon before painting The Last Supper.

Later, the word came to be applied to a drawing in its own right, often about politics or social events. The word was first used to mean a comic illustration of a joke or story in Punch magazine in 1843.

With the coming of the cinema, artists like Walt Disney were able to make characters in stories appear to move in ‘animated cartoons’. This led to ‘strip cartoons’ in newspapers and comic books, where a story is developed in several consecutive frames, each frame showing a new stage in the story, thus creating a narrative. As in the cinema, cartoons can consist of close-ups; medium or long shots, and creating characters, giving them facial expressions, body-language, costumes and adding background objects, helps to carry the story forward.

You too can learn how to do this, to tell a story using the characters that you create. How often do you see people who strike you as interesting, because of their faces, the way they dress, or their way of walking, standing or sitting? These are the people that can become players in your 'stories' or jokes – an endless supply of characters, all different, but each behaving in a recognisable way as a member of the human race.

You can give your 'actors' things to say, show them in full-figure or in close-up – in fact, you can be rather like a film director, fully in charge of your own production.

You probably already are a people-watcher. Now you can put this hobby to good use by recording your impressions, however roughly, building up a collection of characters to act in your stories.