More Newspaper Awareness

My awareness is now in this morning's edition of The Sentinal, paper and website 😀
http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Congleton-teenager-creates-cartoon-superhero/story-23060896-detail/story.html

Television Appearance

Today was a good day for my awareness campaign. ITV News Granada Reports came to my house to interview me and my family about what I have done and what I hope to do. The report was shown on the 6 o'clock news.

Its starting to get serious now 👍✌😀

Here's the link:
http://www.itv.com/news/granada/story/2014-09-23/teenager-creates-superhero-to-raise-awareness-of-genetic-condition/

'Angelman to the rescue'

My next step to my awareness campaign has been completed. I have managed to get an article featured on the official Makaton website for their most recent issue.

Here is the link to the article:
http://www.makaton.org/blog/usingMakaton/PostDetails/6885576209894376996

Start of awareness

My mum phoned up the Congleton Chronicle Office (our local newspaper) explaining our plans and why we were doing it. Our article was featured on the front and back page the week after. This was very exciting. I shared a picture of the article on Facebook and Twitter.

Getting social

After finishing my artwork, I decided to start an official awareness campaign, and so, created both a Facebook and Twitter page.

Here are the links below:

www.facebook.com/angelmansyndawareness

www.twitter.com/@AngelSyndAware

Please feel free to 'Like' and 'Follow' my pages :-)

The artwork

What you will see below are my final products of my Angelman A-Level art project. There is (in order) my comic strip, the inside of my leaflet and the outside of my leaflet. 

The comic strip shows the quiet superhero known as Angelman catching a bank robber. After doing this, the local newspapers arrive and take his pictures. He doesn't speak, only smiles. And once again, the small town of Caelum (Latin for heaven) is safe again.

In the beginning...

Just before Christmas of 2013, my twin brother, Theo, was finally, after nearly 18 years, diagnosed with Angelman Syndrome, after being told he had Cerebral Palsy when he was younger. It is a little known genetic disorder, despite the small ratio of people affected (1 in 20,000 - 25,000). It affects Chromosome 15 on the maternal side.

This was purely by chance, as Theo was struggling with his legs and his walking. We sent him to a specialist to find out why and we got told more than what we bargained for. The specialist checked him over and she told us that she suspected Theo had Angelman Syndrome. We did some research into the condition and we found that Theo had all but one symptom associated with Angelman Syndrome. The specialist ran some DNA tests and the results came back 'Positive' that he had Angelman Syndrome. The specialist also did some tests on my mum and it turns out that it was just a one-off, and will not affect any of my cousin's children or my children. This was a relief.

It was after this that I decided to dedicate an A-Level art project to Angelman Syndrome. I asked my art teachers and they said it should be okay to do. Because of the name being 'Angelman', I decided to turn Angelman into a superhero and make a comic strip to outline some of the symptoms. I also made a leaflet to explain what the condition was and what ALL the symptoms are. This was all done on Photoshop.

After I completed the project, I decided to take it further and create an awareness campaign to make the condition much more well known. My goal is to make it  as well known as Cancer, Down Syndrome and Autism.

I have created a Facebook page, a Twitter page and also got an article featured on the front and back page of my local newspaper. I'm now hoping to get my awareness campaign featured on national newspapers and also on Television.