This is IT. The home stretch, the final 4 days of the fist D4RT Kickstarter. If you were planning on backing/blogging/tweeting/Facebooking/can-and-stringing about this, the time is now. We’re at $7,233, which means D4RT Yantaló is in good shape! My shopping list is ready, I’m consulting with several child educators, talking to representatives of the Yantaló school, and all other related wheels are in motion. I met with Luis Vaszquez of the Yantaló Peru Foundation over the weekend and am more excited for this adventure than ever before.

I also conducted a Twitter poll asking my readers for recommendations of the best in children’s comics [my own childhood comics experience accidentally began with a discovery of my parents’ racy French comics, then went straight to Sandman – advice was needed], and, if all goes well, will spend a day introducing the concept of sequential art and inviting the class to create their own comics strips. If you have your own kid-safe comics suggestions, please add them in the comments section.

As promised, I’ve uploaded more outtake videos from the original Kickstarter video. Behold:


This was on my Tumblr last week.


This footage of our house was shot as potential filler, but never used.

If you’re just catching up with D4RT, it’s a mobile workshop that aims to bring art education, supplies, and public art projects to impoverished communities worldwide. The first installment will take place in a few weeks in Peru.

Several months ago, I met a small group of filmmakers working on a documentary piece about Yantaló – a Peruvian village in the heart of the Amazon jungle. As I watched their raw footage, I fell in love with Yantaló’s people and the close-knit community they’ve managed to cultivate despite harsh economic strains. I was especially impacted by the struggles of the local kids and learning that there is just one school in Yantalo, offering a bare-bones education with no art programs whatsoever. Children spend their free time working in fields with their parents and finishing their homework, stuck in a mundane routine with no creative outlets to nourish their emotional development. Art education is essential in stimulating cognitive skills as well as vital life skills, such as critical thinking, self-confidence and self-discipline – that’s where D4RT comes in.

We met my original goal of $5,000 within the first few days of the D4RT Kickstarter launch. If we’re able to spread the word and raise another $5,767 in the next 4 days, it will cover a second installment in this Cambodian orphanage.