I was created to create.

Way back in January I teamed up with a new ministry aimed at reshaping faith into something that was more liveable and approachable for the 20 and early 30 somethings crowd. It is called the Painted Door and it is headed up by Pastor Mark (my church's newest pastor).

Pastor Mark approached me with the idea of taking some spoken word he composed and pairing it with time lapsed illustrations that would help illuminate the identity of the Painted Door and also help to explain what it aims to do. I was very intrigued by the idea if only because it allowed me to do THE thing that I aim to do every day in my life: create for the glory of Christ.

Now, just to clarify something, I very much consider myself a Christian artist. This is despite the fact that my body of work is not strictly composed of subject matter like stereotypical Christian symbology like doves, Jesus sitting around with children on His lap, the crucifixion, Noah's ark, and/or anything involving angels. Don't get me wrong, I love a good illustration of anything in the Bible but I just don't believe that the only way an individual can be a Christian artist is to do strictly things of the Bible. *shrug* I don't know. I'm sure something could be said that disputes my claim but I still maintain it.

As far as I'm concerned, being a Christian artist (or a Christian anything for that matter) means doing whatever you believe you are called to do in the best way you know how and with the greatest level of excellence and achievement you can attain. I firmly believe that God created each and every one of us to do and be different things for the better of the world as a whole. After all, if we all were created exactly alike, how would this world function the way it does? And as for me? I believe that I was created to create in the best way I know how and with all of my might from a place where the inspiration is always of Christ. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't done it like this all my life but I firmly believe that having the contrast of a creative life not so firmly planted within Christ has allowed me to see the amazing things that can and will occur when you do give everything you have over to Him. I hope I am a living testament of that kind of truth - with my body of work, with my identity of being visual artist, with the way I teach - ALL of it. Every last bit.

All that being said (and back to the video), it is an amazing blessing for me to be able to (literally) use my time and talents to evangelize the name of Christ and the message that He has delivered for all of us to receive.

The amazing thing with all of this is that when I agreed to do it, I had no clue what I was signing on for and when the day finally arrived for me to do all of the filming and drawing, I had no clue what I was going to do. Little known fact about me: right now I am being tested for some pretty serious learning disability issues that strongly impact my ability to have even decent reading comprehension and synthesizing of information.

When I arrived for the filming, I was told that I only had but a handful of hours to do the drawings and be filmed. Pair that time crunch with the fact that none of my cohorts had very many ideas for the drawing in mind and that left me holding a number of pages of very abstract ideas in a beautifully written spoken word poem that was lengthy for me to read and then understand. Amazingly enough (and after a good solid heartfelt prayer for some serious wisdom and guidance!), the Lord really provided me with some wonderful visually descriptive inspirations that totaled over 15 drawings!!! Here's the thing: drawing is NOT my strong suit and I am always better doing three dimensional and/or digital works of art. Still? I staked myself to the fortitude of the God who created me and I staked myself to the promise that I believe that is He created me to create. And in less than 7 hours of time, over 15 drawings were conceptualized, filmed, and finished and ready to be edited and pieced together into this amazing piece of video short...

I hope you enjoyed this and also were able to get the message that it attempted to present. The hands drawing were mine but the ideas and inspirations that originated everything you saw were strictly of my amazing Christ Jesus and what I believe is His Holy Spirit.

Thanks so much for being a part of this incredible life that I get to live for Him! Please contact me directly if you have any questions about this endeavor or if you ever want to talk more specifically about my walk of faith with Him.

Not my art: Day of the Dead statuette of Frida Kahlo

This lovely little piece of finery is courtesy of a junior year student aide for one of the 3D Design classes. She did this work for the purpose of fulfilling a passport credit (one of the standard foreign language components here at my school) for Spanish class.  It's hard to tell but this little statuette stands only about six inches tall. It was modeled out of scupley clay and then she painted it with acrylics with a few extra embellishments like string (for the braid that you can't see).

It's very significant that I am a fan of this piece of artwork in the first place because I am normally not a fan of day of the dead stuff. Am I unreasonably unyielding to new ideas? Perhaps it's more than I'm bad at employing disinterested pleasure. Still, my lovely student aide brought this little piece to class (it's technically a work-in-progress for her) in an effort to ask me advice on some design decisions she was trying to make and I couldn't help but be completely enthralled by it. The picture above fails to show how well detailed it is (with her sculpting technique and overall attention to detail) and how truly charming it is in real life.

Forget instagram! Pixlr-o-matic is where it is.

While I really appreciate Apple and all of what it's done to revolutionize smart phones so that they can be that much more useful in everyday life, I am actually an android phone user. My phone is the HTC EVO and one of my most used apps on board is a photo taking and processing app called Pixlr-o-matic. As it happens, it's also a web-based app you can try out via the link!

While it helps that I have some good solid working knowledge of photography and digital processing/photo effects because of other work that I do outside of teaching and being a working visual artist, Pixlr-o-matic is a great app to use for even just the camera/photo enthusiast. Most all of the pictures I take and post here originate from the app and while I definitely go overboard with the processing sometimes, it's still fun to use to manipulate the photographic images I take to document every day life. Something else that is awesome about this app? It's F-R-E-E!!! And it also doesn't square crop everything like instagram does. 

Here are some of my more favorite images taken with my phone and processed with Pixlr-o-matic...

Definitely these are no pro pictures but they aren't intended to be either. Possibly they could be classified as annoyingly "artsy" because of the way they are processed and how the images themselves are composed but *shrug* who cares? It's fun and that's the real point.

Art Teacher Hack: Organize markers by color!

One of my greatest personal challenges as an art teacher is organization. Surprise, surprise! At any given time I have tons of "stuff" that is a real pain to manage because of just how much of it I have. I won't go as far as to say that I am a hoarder but, well... I guess I sort of am. As it works though, I think this might be a problem that most any art teacher has. There are just always bits and bobs and things that I might collect at any given time because... oh, I don't know - I might really need any one of things to make something!!!

Anyway, sometime last year I invested in Bic Mark-it 24 Color marker sets. They happened to be on sale (don't remember the price but it was AMAZING!) so I plunked down the money and got somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 sets. (I KNOW!!! Cool, eh?)  The students have loved using them (this is our third major project for them) and they have really held up for us to be able to get some solid use from them for another go-round. My only complaint? They are a pain to manage when it comes to keeping them in sets. No matter what I do to try and keep them in individual sets, it just doesn't work and I end up after class/at the end of the school day sorting them with the always faithful and wonderful art students who gather to socialize. *sigh*

After doing the above for close to a week and being annoyed beyond belief, it hit me that instead of just throwing them all into a big bin that will make it even harder to find the colors that you might want to use, why not save the cases and then sort them by their chromatic groupings/pairings! And voila!!  We had a new system that not only works but is really easy to manage.

In the future I might do this for all coloring materials that are not paint. It just works well and I'm all about well-oiled systems like that.

Lesson idea: Smart phone menu illustration

The students had a real love-hate relationship with this project. *heh*

It was the first long-term and self-directed project they completed and they used a tutorial found online to inform their design decisions.

I encouraged them to do nine original app buttons and to really "think outside the box" to come up with app ideas that would (essentially) be physically impossible to have. It really was fun listening and joining in on their conversations and some of the apps they came up were both fun, funny, and (at times) very ingenius. One thing I allowed them to do (outside of the normal scope of things) was to engage and interact with their own social networks via twitter and/or facebook. I encouraged them to pose the question "What would be a really cool app that couldn't exist but should?" They didn't get a ton of responses back but the ones who did were very excited to take on the challenge to create some of the ideas posed to them.

Something else interesting to note of this project: the male students have really outperformed the female ones. This isn't to say that the female students did poorly. The male students were simply a lot faster at completing the project on the whole and they were way more focused on the project as a whole.

Here are some of the student pieces that I've enjoyed...

I really liked this project idea because it really instructed upon how the basics of illustrator can be rendered and even stretched to create something that is very simply done but not without solid creativity and clean and well thought-out design decisions.

This project is leading itself into the illustrated recipe project (they have already begun and are working on it currently) and we will be making an illustrated recipe book just like we did last year. The only difference is this year's recipe book will be a 10x10 size because I just happen to have a groupon that I need to use before July that will help offset the production cost. *Yay for things being impeccably timed!!!*