Our days are numbered... what will they count for? This illustration accompanied a series of talks about the wisdom in learning to "number our days" correctly. A man contemplates the urgency of his time on earth, overshadowed by a giant clock tower.
Our time in life is precious and limited, how can we make the most of it to fulfill the opportunities God gives us?
Illustration for a new teaching series launching on Easter Sunday. The theme is about learning to see our problems differently—through the resurrection of Jesus, hope is never lost.
A shipwrecked man perseveres, looking outward for help instead of despair. In the aftermath of our struggles we can do the same. If we adopt the right perspective, our problems can become the starting point for growth and change.
If you're looking for fun holiday activities for your kids or students to enjoy, please feel free to download copies of this printable coloring book page. I drew this Christmas nativity scene coloring sheet for my church and it's now available for free download and noncommercial use. It was fun doing my own take on the famous Bible scene with Mary & Joseph by the manger, and a whimsical interpretation of the donkey, sheep and cow characters welcoming Jesus in the stable on the night of his birth.
I hope you enjoy it... Merry Christmas!
Download Coloring Pages
TERMS OF USE: Permission is granted to reproduce up to 25,000 copies for noncommercial use by families, Christian churches, children's ministries, Sunday School classes, and non-profit or educational organizations. This image may not be re-published as part of a book but may be distributed as individual printed sheets or as part of a small packet of 20 or fewer sheets. Please contact me if you need additional permissions or if you'd like to commission other unique illustrations.
You might also enjoy The Advent Storybook, an new family devotional for the Christmas season which I illustrated. Watch the trailer or look up The Advent Storybookon Amazon.com
The Bible App for Kids launched on November 28, Thanksgiving Day, with great success! Within its first twelve hours, the app became the #1 free kids app and #1 free education app in the app store, eventually reaching the top three among free iPhone and iPad apps overall! Hundreds of thousands of families have been able to download and enjoy the app in just a few days!
This Thanksgiving season, I'm thankful to be part of an awesome team working to bring these stories to life for kids around the world. My clients, YouVersion and OneHope, have a great vision for the potential of this project, which has the broadest reach of any I've worked on so far. It is an amazing privilege to be involved creatively as an artist.
The Bible App for Kids enables children and families to explore a growing collection of Bible stories with touch-activated animations and learning activities. And it’s free, so the whole family can install it on iPhone, iPad, Kindle, and Android phones and tablets.
Visit bible.com/kids to learn more and download the free app.
This illustration was created to accompany a series of talks about "grace", which is God's undeserved favor. The Bible is full of surprising stories of people who experienced mercy instead of justice, blessing in place of punishment, and kindness when you might expect only retribution. I wanted this image to convey humility and awe, with a strong contrast between the recipient and the reward.
The scene was inspired by the famous story of "the prodigal son," who chose a wasteful and dishonorable path in life, but when he returned to his father in desperation, he was surprised to find a warm welcome, symbolized by his father's cloak and ring.
This image will be used leading up through Christmas, so I also sought to give it an appropriate feel through colors and textures, which could also be the jumping off point for other imagery and decor.
Excited to announce that I have been working as an artist with YouVersion, makers of the world's leading mobile Bible App, and OneHope, a ministry seeking to bring God's Word to every child. They are developing the Bible App for Kids, which delivers animated Bible stories in a free app for smartphones and tablets.
Working as an illustrator under the senior artist Rob McClurkan, my role is to flesh out each scene with color, and to build character and background assets based on his designs and line sketches. The vector art assets I produce are passed along to the animation and interactive teams who do all kinds of fun stuff with them for the delight of the kids.
The animated kids app will be available later this year, check out the promo below! You can also see some of my other illustration work for churches, ministries, and kids media on my website.
I've opened a small art print store on Society6 with some of my work. Initially, I'm offering two inspirational prints with Christian faith themes, however I plan to expand the shop with some of my other kinds of illustration soon.
The prints are designed to look great and last a long time, on fine art quality paper (natural white, matte, ultra smooth, 100% cotton rag,
acid and lignin free archival paper to be exact). They're printed using an advanced digital dry ink
method to ensure vibrant image quality, and each image is available in a range of sizes.
Illustration for a teaching series called "Following," about how Jesus Christ calls his disciples to carry the cross and follow him.
I really enjoyed studying how light and shadow behave when the sun is at a low angle. Generally I'm learning more and more the importance of really studying and gaining enough reference material at the beginning to enable a successful painting. Initially I was intimidated by having to fill so much space with nondescript abstract shapes like dirt and grass, but with enough reference study, eventually my mind was able to understand more how those objects work, so I could be thoughtful in inventing them for this image.
Painting all the
dirt and grass was also a great opportunity to get practice with Photoshop's
"scatter" brush tools. Special thanks to Chris Oatley for his great scatter brush tutorial.
This cross image as well as several other sermon illustration images are available for licensing by churches, ministries, and Christian publishers. Contact me if you'd like more info.
Last weekend my church invited me to share about dealing with worry while trying to pursue my career as an artist. It ended up in the podcast, so if you're interested you can take a listen online. My part is from minutes 8:00 to 17:00...
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The
rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the
rock."
—Matthew 7:24-25
Created for a teaching series called "Rock Solid", with this image I really wanted to give a sense of movement and force to the waves. Their impact is powerful, yet it simply serves to demonstrate the sturdiness of the rock. The scene was also inspired by a day spent at the cliffs in Palos Verdes, though thankfully the waves weren't quite so rough!
This parable image as well as several other sermon illustration images are available for licensing by churches, ministries, and Christian publishers. Contact me if you'd like more info.
Last year I had a great opportunity to work on a project that combined my illustration and web design skills into one project. PrayBuzz is an innovative new web and mobile application that makes it easy for friends and family to pray for one another anytime. Like a lot of web startups, they saw value in creating a short explanatory video that could share their vision for the end product.
I was brought on to storyboard, design characters, and generate illustration assets, which were then animated in Adobe After-Effects by a colleague. Since the project was in very early stages, it was helpful that I had an understanding of web & interface design and could visualize the product before it was completed. Though the animation is necessarily limited for a project of this size, we were nonetheless aiming to do something a little more advanced than stick figures. You can watch the video above to see what we came up with.
PrayBuzz is one of those projects every once in a while which is not only great to work on, but also becomes something that I can personally benefit from using. Now that the site is in Public Beta, anyone can try it out and see if it helps you know what and who you can pray for. Right now I've been encouraged knowing friends are praying for me as take some next steps to build my freelance endeavors. It's been a big boost as I'm taking risks.
What about you? What would you ask people to pray for?
This sermon illustration for Church in the Valley, was designed to accompany a new message series called "Gifts in Return." The pastor discussed the gifts we give to God in return for all the amazing gifts he first gave us. The theme ties in nicely with both Thanksgiving and Christmas, so naturally the graphics took on a seasonal look as well.
I recently completed design and illustration on this promotional mailer for Fellowship Church of Burbank. They're starting a new message series on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, hoping to sift through the cultural misconceptions and preconceived notions of who Jesus was, and rediscover the "vintage" Jesus as presented in the Bible.
The Pastor at FCB is a really cool, deep-thinking guy; it was a lot of fun to work with him on the project. He gave me a good measure of creative license which was encouraging and a challenge at the same time. The main ideas we hoped to convey were a sense of organic authenticity, community, and "vintageness." "Vintage" can fit a lot of things, from 60's concert posters to 50's advertisements or 40's fruit crate labels, so I researched a bunch of different kinds of vintage references to find aspects that would fit our project. The result, I hope, is an image that feels "Vintage" without necessarily being tied to one specific era or genre.
The series kicks off this Sunday and will be going for a few months. If you're in the area, check it out!
This I made a few weeks ago to illustrate a sermon called "So What Now?" about responding to the unexpected changes in life.
Drawing this was a good learning experience, I started out the process with a specific style in mind, one that is only very newly developing for me. After many attempts, I found it stifling to try to inject that style into this picture while it's still immature. Eventually I realized it'd probably be best just to draw the picture without too much attention to style, and let whatever comes naturally for me be the look. That worked much better!
I did a lot of stages in building up the drawing, from thumbnail, to figure wireframes, to a rough sketches, and a final drawing. It was very helpful, so I'll try to make the most of that process in the future, while hopefully streamlining it a bit more with practice.
