Editartz started in 2019 as a community of illustrators that worked together on the same monthly art challenges.
In October 2020, the editorial workstream started to focus on environmental issues, and we launched a new series of monthly challenges called “Planet Posters”, in collaboration with One Planet Conservation Awareness (which is also part of the Conservation Optimism network). More information about the “Planet Posters” project is on our website. Illustrators created beautiful illustrations that are available to see on our Instagram page.
In March 2021 we also took part in the “Our Other Mother Campaign” in the UK, in collaboration with other environmental organisations and illustrators Jim Field and Rebecca Cobb. More information about the campaign is available on our website.
Since 2019, editartz has grown from a small group to an international community of about 700 illustrators. But we don’t want to stop here. We are now working on taking our project to the next level and focus exclusively on climate change.
Our vision for editartz in 2022 is to become an online web platform for environmental “artivism”, that allows writers and illustrators to collaborate together and create illustrated articles, interviews, short stories or poems about the climate emergency.
Articles and illustrations will raise awareness about the global climate crisis. In particular, the evidence about its consequences on the natural world and the communities of people across the globe; the projects, organisations and individuals involved in fighting the emergency; the solutions at hand that need to be pushed forward; and the innovation that can make a difference in the near future.
We are currently busy working on the implementation of the technology behind the platform and we are going to start a crowdfunding campaign to make editartz sustainable in the long term.
We would love to be part of the Conservation Optimism network as we think we share a lot in common with the other organizations in the network. As our platform grows, we want to support projects across the globe that are proposing practical solutions to the climate emergency. Organizations and individuals can write and submit articles, stories or interviews to be featured in editartz challenges, and our community of illustrators will respond to the challenges creating beautiful artworks that will be internally reviewed by our team and published online.
Our plan is to update our website in January 2022 with a first version of the editartz platform, and it will be great to be part of the Conservation Optimism network at that point when we start this new exciting chapter of our project!