18 May 2020
Tree Collage Challenge
Today is the start of Mental Health Awareness Week (18-24 May 2020) and this year’s theme is kindness. In my opinion this starts with being kinder to yourself and there are many ways to do this. As my colleague Hannah Nagle recently reminded me in her recent blog post, creative activities can help you to relax, lift your mood and enable you to express yourself. Also, I personally find that spending time in green spaces and appreciating nature is of great benefit to my mental wellbeing. UK mental health charity Mind promote ecotherapy and have a helpful section on their website all about nature and mental health.
However, I appreciate that it is not always possible for people to get outside to enjoy nature, especially in the current corona pandemic situation. However, there are ways to bring nature into our homes, such as listening to recordings of bird songs, looking at pictures, and watching videos of wildlife and landscapes. For more ideas on digital ways of connecting to nature, I suggest checking out “Nature and Wellbeing in the Digital Age” by Sue Thomas, who believes we don’t need to disconnect from the internet to reconnect with the earth, sea and sky.
Furthermore, why not participate in this year’s Urban Tree Festival (16-24 May 2020), which is completely online. There is a wide programme of talks and activities, including meditation, daily birdsong, virtual tours, radio and a book club. The festival also includes some brilliant art activities.
Save Our Street Trees Northampton have invited people to create a virtual urban forest in their windows, by building a tree out of paper, then adding leaves every day to slowly build up a tree canopy. People are then encouraged to share photos of their paper trees on social media tagging them #NewLeaf.
Want to #craft some #family time & celebrate #nature on your doorstep? Join our UK-wide #NewLeaf project for @UrbanTreeFest & grow a virtual #urbanforest in your window May 16-24! Go to https://t.co/JtMCn8kj4u for more info 💚🌳 #urbantreefestival #saveourstreettrees #trees #tree pic.twitter.com/FWd7CYoFNN
— SaveOurStreetTrees (@SaveStreetTrees) May 14, 2020
Another Urban Tree Festival art project is Branching out with Ruth Broadbent, where people are invited to co-create imaginary trees by observing and drawing selected branches and foliage from sections of different trees. These might be seen from gardens or windows, from photos or from memory.
Paintings and drawings of trees are also celebrated in the Europeana’s Trees in Art online gallery, which has been launched by the festival today, to showcase artworks, which depict trees in urban and rural landscapes, from the digitised collections of museums, galleries, libraries and archives across Europe, including tree book illustrations from the British Library.
Not wanting to be left out of the fun, here at the British Library, we have set a Tree Collage Challenge, which invites you to make artistic collages featuring trees and nature, using our book illustrations from the British Library’s Flickr account.
This collection of over a million Public Domain images can be used by anyone for free, without copyright restrictions. The images are illustrations taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books. You can read more about them here.
As a starting point, for finding images for your collages, you may find it useful to browse themed albums. In particular the Flora & Fauna albums are rich resources for finding trees, plants, animals and birds.
To learn how to make digital collages, my colleague Hannah Nagle has written a handy guide, to help get you started. You can download this here.
We hope you have fun and we can’t wait to see your collage creations! So please post your pictures to Twitter and Instagram using #GreatTree and #UrbanTreeFestival. British Library curators will be following the challenge with interest and showcasing their favourite tree collages in future blog posts, so watch this space!
This post is by Digital Curator Stella Wisdom (@miss_wisdom)