atlas – Giants & Pilgrims

Atlas Mural Process Photos

June 27, 2016/0 Comments/in Art, Creative Process, Online /by Betony Coons

I just put the finishing touches on the Atlas mural this morning! This piece has been three years in the works and I am so excited to show you the finished project. Thank you so much to the City of Greeley for this opportunity and to the Atlas Theater and John Galt crews.

If you want to stop by and see it in person, it is at 709 16th Street in Greeley, CO.

BEFORE…

Power washing that dirty wall

My new “fade” expert

The background ombre almost done…

Lots of filling in shapes

Painted using a mixture of spray paint and hand brushing

Lots of late nights…

Getting closer!

Such adorable little helpers. And they are getting pretty good with paintbrushes!

Almost done….

and….AFTER!!

The finished piece.

This mural was definitely a family effort!

Now on to Bellwether projects!

February Balm: Practice and Process Part 2

February 27, 2016/0 Comments/in Art, Bellwether, Family, Music /by Betony Coons

PRACTICE:

As we are making our way through February, Betony and I have been staying true to practicing the two things we put forward at the beginning of the month:
Praying for people each night as a family
and
Exploring where our family can do service work (especially looking in to “Turn Around Bikes” in Greeley).

Volunteering

So we met with Liz Young and her intern of Turn Around Bikes last week just asking, “What all do you guys need this year?” Since Betony and I have experience with putting on big events and art shows we volunteered for the “Turn Around Bikes” fundraiser committee. Be looking for a that event come July! It should be an incredible time of biking, live music, food, and Weldwerks Brewing Company will hopefully be involved.

We also decided to do a special for the next two weeks on our site: 100% of proceeds of sales of this print go to support Turnaround Bikes!

PROCESS

I’ve been performing a new song this year that has really good energy when I sing it for people. I’ve been ending sets with it. “There is a Balm in Gilead” is a song about deep hope and it feels like a proclamation every time I sing it. It felt right that we would record this song in February and release it with this theme being lived out… More to come on that in a couple days!

Betony put up some versions of this incredible poster last week on Facebook. (True to Giants & Pilgrims projects, it coincides with the song.) You all voted and chose this version! It will be up for sale alongside the song in a couple days as well!

Some folks that helped make “There is a Balm in Gilead” happen (Charla Bultman, Brian Claxton, and sound engineer/ producer David Wilton):

My friend Jeff Cook and I released a teaching/song meditation for Lent called Observance.

FURTHER EXPLORING “BALM”

We read “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane” out loud as a family this month. There are so many beautiful and interesting spiritual archetypes in this book: baptism, desert, resurrection, etc. The whole of the book explores LOVE as an act of giving and sacrifice that shapes someone for the better.

Betony has also been reading “Home Grown” and “Man’s Search for Meaning”. She is highly recommending them for me as well!

This month I helped friend and Giants & Pilgrims band member Mary Claxton do a songwriting intensive, while Betony designed a set for Frontier Academy Elementary’s performance of Aladdin and volunteered to help with a art show fundraiser at our pre-school (check out those Lorax trees)!

The family took a trip to see the orchids at Denver’s Botanic Gardens.

And we had lots of fun with Valentine’s shenanigans:

And, speaking of “Balm”, I have been batching my newest set of colognes, beard oils, and aftershaves!

That’s all for now! March is going to be all about “Ground” so be watching for that soon!

A Tribute to Atlas Church’s 10 Years

September 15, 2015/0 Comments/in Art, Creative Process /by Betony Coons

Atlas, our church and family community in Greeley, CO, that we helped start, turned 10 this last Sunday. As my friend Kelly put it, Atlas celebrated their 10th Anniversary – not birthday. Birthdays happen no matter what. Anniversaries are something you work hard for. You are celebrating work, blood, sweat, and tears. So, Happy Anniversary Atlas!

Since it’s very beginning, I have been in charge of the series artwork for the services. It’s one of those rewarding little side projects that can also drive me crazy. These were almost always put together at the last minute with little or no direction. Usually Jeff or Tim would send me the series title pretty late in the week I would kick myself for forgetting to be more on top of things and stay up late creating the graphics. Some of these are embarrassingly bad. Really I can’t believe I’m not just hiding them. And some, in my opinion, are still pretty lovely.
I thought about putting up all 10 years worth of art, but that was too much! But there are quite a few here. These are just some highlights (and low lights… ha). These are not in any particular order, so keep scrolling.

One of our very very first series was called 7 and was about the seven deadly sins. Each week I designed and printed these photo postcards and hand stamped and stuffed paper bags for every person. It was our first really successful series. I don’t have a slide graphic, because we didn’t have a screen back then.

All sorts of Advent Series:

I still really like the way this one looks:

My favorite Easter series artwork. We also wheat pasted these giant flowers all over the walls of the building inside and out. It was pretty great. BBM slide
This one had a series of watercolors starting with a seed. Each weed the little sprout would grow. On easter morning it turned into a flower. I still don’t get the series title.

I would really like to take off that bad vignette filter on this one…

This was from a larger painting I made. I still really like this piece.
Another one from the very early days. Called “Elements.” Every program was a hand stamped block print. If I recall I think I printed them on watercolor paper and spent hours carefully tearing the edges of every sheet.

Pretty sure I was working on our very first church directory when I made this one. Lots of people I love in those tiny photos. There are still 11 or so of us from the very early days.

Another one from one of my paintings. I totally forgot about this piece.

If I remember correctly, I think I did this on Tim’s laptop while driving home from KS. I still like how it turned out.
These are kind of hard to see here, but I loved this set of collages. This series was from the very beginning of Atlas when I was still young and crazy enough to make one original piece for each week instead of an entire series. These were a Lenten series. Each represents a chapter in John leading up to Easter- water to wine, washing feet, palm branches, black friday, etc. We printed them out tall and skinny. They looked really cool.

I still like this one. Grunge lives on!

These two photos were from a series called Holy is Normal (I think…). I took a different photo for each week. This one with the names was about loving the street our church is on. I had the various business owners hold up signs with their names and took a photo of them.

This is a more recent one. I really love it. It feels very “me”.

Another one from the very early days:

I can’t take credit for this one, but it was pretty cool. Two artists in our community – Brenton and Amy. Converted parables into graphic novel form. They did one for EACH week. it was crazy awesome.

I this was from this last year. I still really like this minimal design.
I LOVE this wood texture. I think for the Black Friday artwork I did an inverse of this so it was black with white highlights instead.

This is definitely still one of my favorite series and artwork. We had just gotten kicked out of our space. We spent several weeks meeting in the back yard of a house instead. It felt holy.
This was for a Thanksgiving series. I think I printed cards out that people could write thank you notes to people on as well.

Another oldie.

This series ended in having a giant picnic in a park.
I have no recollection of anything about these next couple…
The only thing I ‘remember’ about this artwork was that I HATED it at the time but got so frustrated with it that I just sent it on anyway.
This series was really fun. They had artists do live painting each week. The idea was about repainting the way we look at our faith.
Whoa. This one looks SO outdated and cheesy now! I swear it was cool at the time. Hopefully…ha! I think this was our second or third series we did. Everyone had these really elaborate 3-ring binders that I made and added stuff to each week. It was so much work.

I still really love the subtlety of this one. Reminder to self – use more neutral colors…

Some seriously bad filters on this one…

This one is kind of odd. It was one of those where they sent me the series title and I was like “What? Seriously?” Now what am I supposed to do with that…

Obviously from about 6 years ago. Not cool any more.

I wish I cropped this one a little differently. I still like the color scheme though.

I want to get rid of the secondary text on this one.

Why oh why is that bird graphic pixelated? Really Betony?
I really love how the word here is slightly off kilter.
I like how this background turned out. But that font is just way too much…
Another one that looks so outdated now… 🙂

Another collage series that I still really like.

This was the original Atlas Logo and title slide, later switched to the current circle with triangles (designed by Kathryn Nash).
Thanks for indulging me 🙂

Happy 10th Anniversary Atlas!!

Midwest Road Adventures and “Maps” – a round up of the month of July

July 30, 2015/0 Comments/in Abacus, Almanac Adventure Days, Family, Travel /by Betony Coons

Most of our July was spent exploring the midwest. What better way to incorporate the theme “Maps” then getting out and living on one. Eight states in two weeks (that includes Tim’s whirlwind trip to North Carolina for the Wild Goose Festival)!

While road tripping, we did several fun pages out of the Maps Activity book –

We weren’t able to stop a lot (seeing as we were in the car for too long already) but, we did make two really wonderful detours on our way to Lake Geneva, WI. Since we were going through two state capitals, we stopped at both the Nebraska State Capital building and the Iowa State Capital Building. And WOW were they wonderful. Why is “Visiting Every State Capital” not something everyone does?!? These two building were filled with incredible history, art, incredible architecture, and craftsmanship that you just don’t see that often in our ‘slap it together and sell it cheap’ culture we live in. We all felt like we were exploring old castles of old. And both the Iowa building and the Nebraska buildings were so different! Here are a few picture from both.
Nebraska First –

Amazing Castle-like building, beautiful mosaics, and, best of all, an old wood paneled elevator that took you to the top of the tower to an open air walkway with panoramic views of the whole city.

Some Zelda scenes “may” have been re-enacted in these stone passageways

Tried to take a family “Selfie” here. Aw… so cute. And then you notice what Lucy does with her bubble gum….

Some things you didn’t want to know… thanks a lot iPhones…

And Iowa’s Capital Building:

They sure knew what they were doing when they designed the gold domes….

Looking up into the ceiling of the main dome. They took guided tours to the top, which we sadly didn’t do because we had to get back on the road, but next time!

A security guard at the entrance told us to be sure not to miss the Library as it was his favorite room. And boy was he not kidding. It was like stepping into Harry Potter land.

As part of our midwest road trip, we stayed in KS for a few days at my parents farm. They live on 180 acres of wild prairie and orchards. My dad mows these lovely ever-shifting paths through the prairie that have become one of the things we look forward to most when visiting home.

Onto modes of transportation! Also while in KS, the girls had their first encounter with bumper cars (hover crafts more like…) and can’t wait for more…

Picnics are always a good idea.

As are hotel swimming pools.

Once we got back home, we mostly have been playing catch-up – especially with all the art shows and whatnot we have had going on. But here are a few highlights from the end of July.
This is one of the books we picked up from the library on maps. It is called “The Once Upon a Time Map Book” – you can get it here. I can’t recommend it enough. My kids LOVED it. And it teaches so many cool map reading skills – directions, scale, keys, distance, etc. The book gives you a quest of sorts and then have to follow the directions to get through the map, while looking for hidden treasures. So fun.

We definitely drew a treasure map of our backyard and hid treasure. Burning the edges and tea staining it is half the fun.

Some afternoons when mom is trying, ahem, to get ready for an art show she is not ready for yet, you google “kids map games” and let em loose.

The church we are part of, called Atlas, does this amazing kids camp where they make a movie. The kids do almost everything – the acting, costumes, songs, etc. One of the days was all about outer space. Each kid was assigned a role as either a planet, the sun, moon, stars, etc. They physically acted out our solar system as part of our movie. It was so cool. I didn’t get any photos of the kids, but here are a bunch of the parent volunteers pricking holes in a black paper wall that was lit from behind to make constellation star maps. The twinkly black wall was the backdrop in the film for the little kid moons and planets swirling around.

We hung a nice big world map at kid level on the wall and have been having lots of fun conversations about where things like panda bears and cousins live.

July Ideas and Activities Around the Theme “Maps”

July 3, 2015/0 Comments/in Abacus, Almanac Adventure Days, Curriculum, Family, Lists /by Betony Coons

With kids’ school schedules, university classes being over, and activities like dance classes taking a break, July is and always will be the ultimate road trip month. Our theme for our home curriculum this month is “MAPS” – think places to go, atlases, globes, searching for treasure, and charts of imaginary lands. With 4th of July celebrations and their historical roots, what better time to explore this vast and rich country we live in? It is about putting on our explorer caps, blaring some road trip tunes, and charting out adventure.

Read all about how to use this list and our heart behind this project here.

Below is our comprehensive MAPS activities list. Choose a couple to do with your kids to enrich the month or try to accomplish the whole list! What would you add? I would love to hear your ideas and plans for the month.

July Dates to Take Note of:

July 4th – Independence Day

Local Greeley, CO events:

Concert under the Stars – July 8th at the UNCO Garden Theater

Neighborhood Nights in July (Movies/picnics at city parks in greeley) – Muppets Most Wanted, Big Hero 6, The Lego Movie

Greeley Arts Picnic – July 25 and 26

Taste of Windsor – July 16

HISTORY:

Tell the stories of Independence day on the 4th of July and of course enjoy fireworks

We will be heading on a family music/art tour to Wisconsin. On our way, we plan on visiting the Nebraska and Iowa state capitals – hoping to make this a family tradition as we visit new states. Is there a state capitol somewhere near that you could visit? Or at least talk about what state capitols are.

Learn about some of the great explorers – Magellan, Columbus, Lewis & Clark, etc.

Maybe this book would be a fun way to learn about these explorers?

Also want to check out this one (its illustrations alone look incredible)

Look at trains and modes of transportation (hot air balloons anyone?)

Along with that, learn how to play Ticket to Ride, which I have heard is a great game.

ART:

Do straw paintings of fireworks

Paint a treasure map (Image from here) – I particularly like using parchment paper and burning the edges. Just makes it even more, you know, pirate-y. A link to a map we made a couple years ago: Here .