Spreading New Wings

I've recently had a lot more free time for reading and other hobbies - one of which somewhat randomly blossomed into a whole separate website of book reviews. You are welcome to check it out here - obviously - I have given a brief introduction to the origin and nature of the project below, but will begin with a reflection on the design choice as that is the purpose of my portfolio website.

I was actually working on creating a secondary logo for myself for a different project - a potential video blog featuring time-lapses of my art and potentially theological reflections - and simply decided to use it when I decided to begin this endeavor instead, which is why the canary has a halo. I wanted to do something adjacent to my crane logo while steering away from the "origami" element, since that's not really reflective of my corpus, and inevitably gravitated towards the blue canary (inspired by the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse in Your Soul"). The bird itself is built up from a sketch I did in 2019, though the photos I had of it were either incomplete or of too low quality, so I ended up supplementing the original colored pencil quite a bit with digital illustration.

I was inspired to begin re-reading and creating a list of book recommendations by a conversation with my best friend from college. She shared that she had been asked for book recommendations while student teaching and was struggling to come up with a list of recommendations on the spot, and I found myself experiencing the same difficulty, even though we had both been avid readers growing up. So, when I suddenly had more freedom than I knew what to do with, I decided to devote some of it to re-reading old favorites and trying new books aimed at young readers when I went to the library. That, along with my research into developing my own picture book (a project that has involved lots of immersing myself in the genre and taking notes on story structure and what works well) has prompted this archive. I was struggling with making a simple list because it didn't provide context for my recommendations, and somehow it blossomed into something far more detailed (and colorful).