Illustrated by

Joel Hopler

The Inspiration

Small-scale mining in Indonesia: Herding wildcats

Illustrator’s Notes

For this image I placed the gold mining plant at the top of the river, to position it’s dominance of the market, with a whimsically styled wildcat, a reference to rouge gold miners, panning for what gold is left downstream. The article seems to promote a coexistence between legitimate mining companies and wildcat miners, so I framed the image nicely with the Periodic Symbol “Au” at the bottom of it all.