My name is Larime Taylor, and I've been around DKos under several names - Morpheum, The Chairman, now The Gimp - since the old haloscan and scoop days. Today, I need your help.
I've posted before on disabled topics, done some political cartooning, and asked for help once before when we were in desperate need of it. I'm in a wheelchair (birth defect), live with my house-bound (severe Lupus) wife and our live-in care provider, and am a freelance artist living on SSD and our care provider's paycheck. The Governator killed the budget, leading to our aid losing about a third of her hours, and my student loans are being garnished from my SSD. The recent loss of hours for my aid has - no pun intended - crippled us. I owe my landlord over $10k in missed rent over the last two years (some months I simply can't pay it AND keep the utilities on AND feed us), but he's a really nice, caring guy that's always been understanding and never complained. We're truly lucky to have him.
But that's not what this is about. This is about food. I paid rent this month because he's in a tight spot and could get foreclosed on if he misses payments, so I didn't hesitate to give him the rent, even though it's left us with literally $47 for food until February 3rd. My wife's illness won't allow for us to live on ramen, and we've tapped out our families BEFORE this came. We're pretty screwed.
I know that what's going on in Haiti is far more serious than our problems, but I need to put food on my family, as Bush would say, and so all week long I will be doing an emergency blogathon called Will Draw For Food.
I do caricatures, among other things, and I'm offering to draw a caricature of ANYONE, no questions asked, in return for gift cards to grocery stores (i want it clear where this money will be going). Want a caricature of you? You child? Your parents? Siblings? Wife? Boyfriend? Hell, I'll do your favorite athlete, entertainer or politician, too. Anyone. You give me a link to a picture or post one in the comments and I'll draw them. You'll get a link to a high-res jpeg of it when it's done, and you can download it, print it, use it as an avatar, whatever you like. It's yours.
In return, I'll ask you to send whatever you can (even $10 helps!) in gift card form to my mailing address. Wal-Mart gift cards are easiest, as we get groceries at our Super Wal-Mart. If you live in California, Stater Brothers gift cards are good, too, as we shop there as well. I'd suggest checking with me before getting any other kind of gift card as we're in a small town and may not have the store/restaurant you're thinking of. To answer a few quick questions, no we don't have Paypal that we can get cash from to buy groceries, no we can't cash personal checks, yes we can cash money orders if need be, but the gift card route seems the best way to insure to you that we aren't spending your money on hookers and crack.
Anyway, below are some samples. I draw with my mouth, and all art will be black and white only, no color, no graytones even though some of these samples are in color or toned. It will take way too long as I don't have access to all the necessary tools for anything but straight black and white.
Feel free to post your pics here in comments, and email me at xlarimex(at)gmail(dot)com to get our mailing address to send the cards to, and I'll get drawing!
Thank you all in advance, and thank you for reading this.
Larime