Why does our art look like that?

Why have we gone with line art for our studies? It's certainly not because our artist lacks the skills. (Check out her other work here). There’s a couple of main reasons we went with this line art style.

1. It's easy on the wallet

Now, this isn’t just us trying to save money, but we see these studies being printed in ministries that might not want to spend all of the budget on ink or toner. Using line art also means that our studies will look good regardless of whether they are printed in black and white for full colour. We want to make sure material from How Can This Happen looks good irrespective of whether it's printed on a top of the line laser printer or a basic inkjet.

2. It’s a built in activity  

From experience colouring is something children love to do, so why not give them a chance to colour in the studies or any of the A4 size colouring-in sheets that you can download from our store.

The style isn’t the only thing that’s a little bit different about our artwork. As much as possible, we want to create artwork that’s historically accurate and is a part of the teaching. Check out the Illustration of Gabriel talking to Zechariah from our first Luke study, and you might notice Gabriel is missing his wings. Whys that? While Gabriel’s appearance wasn’t described, it's pretty safe to assume from the Old Testament that when angels show up on earth they look like normal men (Gen. 18:2, Ezek. 9:2) Rather than using the cultural shorthand of wings and halos, we wanted the art to form a part of the teaching.

You can also see this in the manger artwork from the third Luke study. The familiar image we have of the manger is a wooden feeding trough. However, contrary to almost every Christmas card I’ve ever seen, Jesus was most likely put in a manger made of stone rather than wood. Is the material the manger was made out of a major point? I don’t think so, but as much as possible, we want our artwork to be a part of helping people to understand the time and place that Jesus lived in. It's not just our written content that we want to be thoroughly Biblical.