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illustration

An Artist’s Vision for Textbooks

June 7, 2018 by Jenna

artist's vision for textbooks
What does art have to do with learning? The team that creates your homeschool curriculum is much more than our Distance Learning teachers and writers. We also have experienced designers who carefully consider how the look and layout of a textbook affect a child’s learning. We’d like to introduce you to someone who plays a vital role in shaping our textbooks.

Del Thompson: Lead Artist

Illustrating Learning in Textbooks

Del is a man who tries to approach everything in life with passion and joy. He first started working at BJU Press in 1978 as an art and design student. He took a job in paste-up—putting together textbook pages by gluing clippings of text and images to cardstock—and soon became a regular student worker. In the summer of 1979, he became an illustrator. He found many opportunities to apply what he had learned in class to his work, and that process was vital to his education. One of his favorite recent projects was the K4 Bible cards.

Working on the K4 Bible cards seemed like a dream job to him. As an illustrator, he embraced the opportunity to challenge artistic traditions in Bible story art. For example, Bible scenes often show Jesus and Abraham wearing the same kinds of clothes, but would a man from Ur  around 2000 BC and a Nazarene of the first century have dressed the same way? You might find some of his corrections to typical representations of Bible times in the Bible Truths K4 Teaching Cards.

designing textbooksMaking Art Do More

In 2011, Del became the art and design manager over the art department. Since then, he has been unable to do as much illustration work as he would prefer, but he has brought together the textbook development teams in a special way by introducing the concept of storyboarding—and adding more snack times. With storyboarding, the designer lays out a project from start to finish to see how it works as a whole. The film industry and other publishing companies often use storyboarding, but it hasn’t always been applied to textbook creation. Pushing the content development teams toward storyboarding introduced them to opportunities for working together that go beyond the efficient.

Del says, “If you know what you’re doing from beginning to end, you can build toward that ending in a much more intelligent fashion.” Content teams now have the opportunity to work together to lay out the strongest product possible. Additionally, Del was able to help everyone on the art and design team to see imagery not as decoration, but as content. Sarah Lompe, one of his illustrators, was able to work with the writers to transform what would have taken several pages to explain into a beautiful piece of art that fused words and images to convey the concepts. You can see this throughout the Biology (5th edition) student text!

textbooks mockupEmpowering Learning Through Art

Del thinks that art in a textbook should travel “the shortest distance from the writer’s brain to the student’s,” which means he doesn’t want to make the content harder to understand. His efforts have thrown new light on the notion of academic rigor. Academic rigor doesn’t mean making concepts harder to learn. Academic rigor means including difficult content but making it attainable for young minds.

He believes that “if a book is put together with a lot of joy (like when you read a novel, and somebody is having a blast writing it), somehow it bleeds through the type. And if a textbook is put together with the same enthusiasm, it will somehow bleed through that text in a way that it becomes more than the sum of its parts.” And that is what Del and his team strive for in each of the textbooks they work on.

Your children may not always realize that the design of their textbooks is helping them learn. They may appreciate the pictures and be thankful for white spaces, but it’s not always obvious to them that those pictures and white spaces teach just as much as the text itself. The next time you’re noticing the color and beauty of your textbooks, take a moment to consider how that color and beauty helps your children to learn better.

textbook artist

Filed Under: Successful Learning Tagged With: academic rigor, art & design, illustration

Create—Communicate—Illustrate

January 23, 2015 by BJU Press Writer

We’re celebrating forty years of BJU Press art! An integral part of our products is the art our employees create to further communicate the meaning of the text that our authors write. Create, Communicate, Illuminate: The Art of BJU Press presents more than sixty pieces that show how the work of our employees in the department of art and design furthers our educational mission. Art media represented include colored pencil, watercolor, oil, acrylic, gouache, fiber, collage, digital, and polymer clay. If you’re in the Greenville area, come see the show in the exhibition corridor of the Sargent Art Building at Bob Jones University. It is on display until January 29. You can find directions here.

For those of you who are unable to attend, here are some photos of several pieces included in the show.

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Main entrance to the Sargent Art Building
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Entrance to the show Create, Communicate, Illuminate: The Art of BJU Press

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“Booker T. Washington” by Paula Cheadle from Book 4 of Take-Along Stories Set 2 from JourneyForth (watercolor)
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“Toucan” by Lynda Slattery from Science 5 (watercolor)

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“Drip Drop” by Cynthia Long from Reading 2 (fiber)

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From left to right “Heritage Studies 6 Cover,” “Heritage Studies 2 Cover,” and “Heritage Studies 3 Cover” by Ben Schipper (paper)

 

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“God’s Big Picture: Timelines” by Michael Asire and Del Thompson from Bible Truths B (digital)

 

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“Baseball” by Sandy Mehus from Math 3 (watercolor)

 

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“Old Ironsides” by Preston Gravely from American Republic (acrylic)

Images by David

What’s your favorite image from a BJU Press textbook or JourneyForth book?

Filed Under: Successful Learning Tagged With: art, art show, communication, create, design, illustration

Through the Eyes of an Illustrator

June 25, 2014 by BJU Press Writer

If I’ve learned anything through the years about homeschooling families, I’ve learned that they love books. When they hear that quote by Erasmus about not buying food and clothes until after he bought books, they laugh with everyone else, but they have to think about it first.

One weekend I was privileged to spend time with two homeschooling families. The conversation was frequently punctuated with trips to the bookcase. By the end of the evening, it was hard to find a place on the coffee table to set my teacup. These parents expressed regard for books on multiple levels. The quality of thought was important but so was a book’s spiritual trajectory. They even talked about the covers, the illustrations, and the paper. For them, books were to be received as rational, ethical, and sensory objects. In other words, their view of books reflected their view of man—a view that considers people as receptacles for the classical triad: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Put another way, we are most human when our thoughts (truth), actions (goodness), and feelings (beauty) speak with one voice.

We often divorce our thinking from our doing and feeling. Secularism tends to pit one against the other. Rationalism, Moralism, and Romanticism all battle with each other like gladiators in an arena. But this is not the Christian view, and it isn’t our view at BJU Press.

 

As an illustrator, I have a professional interest in our continued use of illustration. But let’s be honest: Illustrations are expensive to produce. They drive up printing costs. They delay the production of books. They take up real estate on the page that could be used for textual information. To compound the problem, many who crusade for illustration in education do it in a way that’s embarrassing. “Text is old-fashioned!” they say. “Images are the wave of the future.” These arguments are cringe-worthy and false.  I prefer a more balanced approach, in between the Rationalists and the Romantics, that clarifies why illustration is so important.

Let me explain with a story. When I was in elementary school, my family had an illustrated book about Vikings that included a panoramic illustration of a berserker with an enormous axe charging a group of men with spears. The drama of this image moved me. I looked at it over and over again. The berserker appeared fearless, but the crowd with spears seemed to be very afraid.

I think about this image because I experienced it isolated from the text. At the time I knew nothing about the unsavory motives of Vikings. I only experienced the emotional tingle from the depiction of the energy of a man who loved his cause more than he loved himself. When I later read about men like William Wilberforce, who fought the evils of slavery despite overwhelming odds and constant defeat, I pictured this Viking. When on the news I heard about Christians fighting for virtue despite the general consensus, I pictured this Viking. When I read about people who fought for what was right rather than for what was safe, I thought of this Viking. This image and thousands of others plowed furrows in my brain so that when rational arguments were sown, they had a place to take root and grow.

We want our books to reflect the student’s humanity. Because the student has a mind, our books are written by experts in their fields. Because the student has a conscience, our textbooks integrate a biblical worldview. Because the student has an imagination, we illustrate and design our books to appeal to the senses. Like the homeschooling parents we serve, we at BJU Press aim to do the good work of telling the truth beautifully. This is a worthy goal and one that makes it easy for me to come to work in the morning.

• • • • •

Zach is an illustrator who lives with his wife and daughters in Greenville, South Carolina. In addition to painting illustrations for BJU Press textbooks (such as English 1, Heritage 6, and Reading 5), Zach has done work for the Weekly Standard, Crossway, Disney-Hyperion, Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, and Marvel. He also teaches classes in digital illustration at Furman University.

Filed Under: Simplified Homeschool Tagged With: art, illustration, philosophy

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