Thursday, January 25, 2018

A Few of My Favorite Things ~ Plus a Tutorial!

It is no surprise to anyone who follows my blog or views my art journaling and photographs - I love birds. I enjoy watching them, studying them, photographing them, and include them often in my art. 

Another passion I have is for Bible study and theology. Last week at the library book sale I found a new book by one of my favorite pastor/author/theologian/ Bible commentators, John Stott. I usually buy any book I find by him when I go to book sales, but this one was special. It's called "The Birds Our Teachers: Biblical lessons from a lifelong bird watcher". A book that combines two of my favorite things by one of my favorite authors! And I had no idea that John Stott was also a bird watcher - bonus!



A few weeks ago I found out that 2018 has been named the year of the bird by Audubon and National Geographic to mark the 100th anniversary of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It's a good excuse for me to continue to use birds in my art. Jeanne Oliver is doing a year long project called Series 52 which she says is a way to create a body of work that is just for you. One of my favorite art mediums is collage. Last year for the 100 day project I did scrap collage projects on Rolodex cards. It was a fun challenge to make them on such a small background, but what I loved most about the project was that I did collage more frequently. So I thought doing one intentional piece of collage per week would help me stay connected to this art medium and would be a nice way to work on a different size than my Everyday Journal, although some weeks it may be in that journal. And since it is the Year of the Bird, they will be my focus for my weekly collage.


My collage for week one was made to go into my commonplace notebook.

My collage for week two was inspired by the illustrator Richard Faust, who often includes small geometric collages on his work. This one was done in my Everyday Journal, which is a Traveler's Notebook.

In 2015 I was a member of the foundation team for a group called His Kingdom Come. We did a number of classes that year that were exclusive for group members. Now that this group is no longer in existence I thought I would share the art journal I made for the course we did called God's Aviary. It was a course that studied birds in the Bible and combined that with art journaling.











This was one of my all-time favorite art journal projects! I added the tutorial and the video flip-through of my journal to the pages at the top of this site. Or you can click this link to go directly to that page. Enjoy!

4 comments:

  1. Lovely! This is a great way to regularly create.

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  2. Absolutely wonderful!!! What a great project - God AND birds - my favourite things :-)
    Love your work and your lettering is amazing. Cath x

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    1. I'm so thrilled you have the same passions I do! Thanks so much, Cath!

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  3. This is a wonderful idea! I also am excited to see your materials from His Kingdom Come. I signed up for the course but wasn’t able to participate due to some work issues and now that I retired I was hoping to complete it....so sorry to hear the group is no more.

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