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. 
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!!