Boston, Book 9, and Birdley in Color

I will be going to a Zine convention in Boston this weekend to hear Marek Bennet, another teacher-cartoonist, speak about the use of cartoons in education. Other comic artists, including Colin Tenford and E.J. Barnes, are likely to appear at the convention. Should be a good time.

Between chasing my 3-year old around, book #9 is evolving. Its major include rocks, geologic time, volcanoes, and the role of microbes in shaping the biosphere. It's a lot to squeeze into 96 pages but Birdley will not disappoint. Source cartoons so far include the snottites from the Cueva de la Villa Luz in New Mexico, the three domains of life, intrusive & extrusive igneous rock, and fossil dating. For the latter cartoon I've been drawing some dinosaur fossils with my 3-year-old son, who has become increasingly involved with the Birdley business in recent weeks.

I've seen some cool Dr. Birdley "colorized" cartoons from students. It's always nice to see the characters in color, as I usually work in black and white since the comics need reproducibles. Although Birdley, Phyll, and Norman had their respective color schemes in place, it wasn't until I started doing the website that I had to seriously think about color schemes for Owelle, Clarissa, Lark, Don, and others. Incidentally, keep checking the http://www.birdleymedia.com/ site every so often for new characters and comics. They'll be coming soon.

Dr. Birdley Site Relaunched!

After many long hours, the Dr. Birdley site has been relaunched using CSS. I used Dreamweaver to redesign these core pages and tried to centralize most of the main styles on a CSS page. The major advantage to this is that it is easier to update. Major changes include:
-A "sample pages" page that is viewable in either Flash or Javascript
-An updated "Birdley in the News" page
-An expanded list of "Elsewhere" links that connect to some helpful science educator sites
-A list of descriptions next to each Birdley book
-Three additional books: "Constructing the Earth," "Mysteries of the Earth," and "Forces & Motion."
I was pretty sparing on the Flash elements this time around, as I wanted to make the core site accessible to as many people as possible. I aim to add some additional pages that feature Flash content as time goes on. In the meantime, I look forward to updating the events & elsewhere pages fairly regularly.