This is for the next issue of Fray. The story it's paired with is about a 6th grader's obsession with his fish (Ironic right?). This pretty much poured out after PBS Parents launched.
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Over the past couple of months, I've been coming across this elementary school in multiple readings of the devastation of mountain top removal coal mining. Interestingly enough, all books or articles mention an "elementary school", yet none ever mentioned its actual name. That took some googling and then some guessing.
Anyway, the school, Marsh Fork Elementary, exists a mere 400 yards away from a major coal mining site, which means the children are exposed to a heavily polluted area on a daily basis. The toxins are in their water, their soil, and in the air they breath as they run and play. Not to mention, if the built up coal slurry dams (excess toxic sludge that is leftover after coal is mined) ever give way, which is likened from the mine-seem blasts, these children most likely wouldn't have a chance in a devastating slurry flood. (Which has happened in W. VA, and such dams bursts have claimed 100's of lives.)
To boot, Massey Energy, owner of the coal tower, has requested to build yet a second coal silo at the site. Infuriating enough as that is, it's even more so to find out they were denied, and has further repealed that! (Side note: In my readings, Massey Energy also recently requested the allowance of toxicity levels beyond regulation levels at one of
his coal sites - ridiculous.)
With all of these obvious threats to this school, W. VA government has somehow denied funding to build the children another school out of harms way. It's just mind boggling...
So I'm writing you all to see if you think this is a cause you may be interested in. If so, you can go to the one fundraising website that was difficult to find and donate (it doesn't come up intuitively when you google Marsh Fork Elem, unfortunately, although it's a clever name for the group, it's probably keeping the site from being found.)
http://www.penniesofpromise.org
Oh, they are also on Facebook, just search "Pennies of Promise" (And join!)
I don't see how in this day and age we can move mountaintops, but we can't move a school!
Meanwhile, I'm writing emails, reading up now that I've found a decent path, seeing what I can do... and I'm going to reach out to every teacher and mom I know. Please do the same!
This seems like a no brainer! But, I assume it's difficult for these small groups from nowhere Appalachia to get backing, not to mention in my reading, a lot of local people are afraid to take on the coal companies or complain because so many of their family members are employed by the coal industry in that area. And as you know, you don't bite the hand that feeds you in this country...
So frustrating...
xoxo
Naan
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That Web site again is http://www.penniesofpromise.org.
]]>Koi Paintings will be going up Labor Day and be there for a currently undetermined amount of time. I'm guessing a month, but I'm not sure.
So, to summarize:
Koi Paintings!
Fireflies!
Starting September 1!
This is for the next issue of Fray. The story it's paired with is about a 6th grader's obsession with his fish (Ironic right?). This pretty much poured out after PBS Parents launched.
]]>We re-did the entire site, from front to back, along with the help of The Incredible Pear. We integrated Movable Type, cleaned up the XHTML and the CSS, and brought a new brand look to the whole sha-bang.
Now for most folks this is just another day on the job, but for us? It was the work of 3 regular regular staff members, one contractor, two interns, and two part time temps... for a 1900 page site. And for me, it's the reason for a very long summer and many late nights.
We're really proud of it. Stop by and say hello: http://www.pbsparents.org
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"Too much mouth" was the feedback on this one. Marc's keeping me on task by not letting me get away with overly simple faces. That's not say there won't be style to the book, but I want to tighten up my drawing a bit.
This might be the worst I've ever done.
Much better.
Taurus! We wanted to avoid pure black/traditional villain colors, so we just stayed in the darker hues.
]]>Here I'll sum it up for you:
"Woke up. Went to work. Coded Web pages. Design Web pages. Went home. Ate a sandwich. Slept. Repeat."
The Fireflies show didn't happen, due to some communication snafus, so I'm working on setting up another show soon.
]]>Here's the Gid Webb Process:
He started a bit rounder, a bit of sloth. He has a couple of nasty habits that wouldn't let this happen though, and he's too vain to let himself really go.
I stepped back and focused on his face.
I refined his face a bit and drew a horse. Cause it's a western and has horses. Plus, drawing characters standing around for design sheets bores the crap out of me, so I try to do various stances and situations when I can.
Standard model sheet with a straight ahead view, a profile and a close up. The hair color was way wrong though. As Marc said "I don't think they had peroxide hair bleach back then."
And through the magic of Photoshop, Presto! Gideon Webb: All ready to get in to all sorts of trouble.
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Yes, I work flat on the floor. Yes, I got the idea from watching Pollock.
]]>It was just too weird not to share it with the world.
]]>It's been about 4 years since I've had a big comic project out there, so it's nice to be working on this and Sam Koi with Rhiannon at the same time.
Anyway Marc and I have been going back and forth about story structure and beats, so I'm turning to character design over the next few weeks.
Stab one at Taurus, a villain.
Got some feedback from Marc, so it's on to sketch two.
Sorting through some pictures, I found this one I took of the next batch of Sam Koi pages. 7 pages this time around, and a whole hell of a lot of fish.
Next post will be fish free. Honest.
]]>The project took place at Sharpe Health School on 13th street NW. They take care of students with a range of learning, physical, and mental disabilities, so giving them some fish on their walls was the least I could do.
Click on any of the pictures below to see large versions.
Part 1:
I had gone in the day before to the actual event to sketch in the fish with a super sweet large Sharpie. The next morning I started adding coats of orange.
Part 2:
After the first coat was done I was joined by a couple of volunteers and we did the second coat.
Part 3:
Once that dried (which was pretty much instantaneous cause it was about 85 degrees in that room), I went back and did all the detail work.
So all said and done, it was just about 7 hours of work. Good Karma all around. Apparently they're going to get a fish tank for the room now.
(Thanks Flickr for shrinking my 3000 pixel wide images down to 1/2 their size when I uploaded them... what the heck?)
]]>I took advantage of the destruction to clean up my portfolio and reorganize and my site. I took a lot of older work out, and have added some new illustration work, so be sure to take a look.
If you used any of my old Feeds, they are all nuked and no longer being updated, so be sure to grab the new one:
I'm back!
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