I struggled with making this drawing much more complicated, but in the end, opted for simplicity. I think I was trying to stretch the metaphor to literal dimensions, which ended up producing some rather surreal ideas. 

Below is the process and, as a bonus, a time-lapse of the drawing, including coloring. 

This one started out as pen and marker sketch that I did for Inktober 2019, with the word "tread." I reworked it with Procreate on a 10.2 iPad that was issued to me by my employer. The decision to go all black would have been a lot scarier if I had been using traditional media. I liked the pun on Godzilla because it puts the objection in a more familiar context. 

These three men made a huge impression in church history. Müller started an orphanage to show the power of faith-based ministry, eventually providing for more than 10,000 orphans and providing extensive financial support for China Inland Missions, all without asking for a shilling. He became known as "God's Banker." R. C. Chapman provided Agape Leadership to the early brethren movement, and during its moment of crisis, helped hold together a model of church function that would eventually put more missionaries into the field for its size than any Christian denomination. He also mentored and modeled true servant leadership to a generation of believers. He was often called "the Apostle of Love." Darby formalized the early church's pre-millennial views, including the imminent rapture—views which had long fallen out of favor. He is often recognized as the father of Dispensationalism. 

The picture on the right is an animated gif that shows the process: Pencil sketch, digital trace of pencil sketch, adjustments to traced image which is then printed and inked with traditional brush-pen, scan inks and adjust / cleanup, digital color, textures (hard to see), and color adjustment (toned down the saturation a bit). 

I started a Robert Cleaver Chapman quote art twitter account. Not sure how long it will last, but it has helped me absorb more of Chapman's works—of which there are few. Chapman destroyed most of his sermon notes and writings before he died, saying that he did not want to dilute the milk of the word with his watery ink. That goes with his humble character, but I think we are the worse for it. Right now I only know of four works related to him: Two biographies and two books. The books are "Choice Sayings" and "The Shepherd and His Ransomed Flock." I think there may be one more, but I'm not sure. Both the books were bootleg - originally published without his consent, but after they began circulating he released edited, more accurate versions. 

​Here are three quote art posters I recently made with Canva, an online graphic design tool. You can click them to see larger versions. 

This was an Oswald Chambers quote from his daily devotional, "My Utmost for His Highest." You can read the whole thing at the link. The quote popped up from a post I made a year ago, and I thought it would be a great thing to illustrate. While you can't tell it from below, the window was a last-second addition because I thought it needed something in that area. Then I added the shadow to imply the action of prayer leaving the room. One thing I would have liked to do also would have been to put a stark yellow highlight out from the windows across the bed. Maybe I'll go back and add it to just see if it looked right, but most likely I'll just leave it alone and go on to the next one. 

I also added a color overlay, because the original was way too bright. I think it worked well. Though it did mute the contrast a lot, it made the room look like it was in twilight, which I liked. 

Ok, I said I probably wouldn't, but here it is. I added the yellow highlight. Still not sure which I like better. 

This one is interesting. I came up with idea after reading in Philippians back in December. I doodled two different ideas trying to get the idea of how decreasing self would increase spiritual rewards and intimacy. The problem is that they were too complicated. So I shelved it. Then, nearly two months later, just out of nowhere, I got this idea. It's not quite the depiction of a gradual process, like sand coming out, it's more direct: Drop the suitcases or you can't climb. (You can see one more idea in the scratched out part on the right images: Climbing a hill with a big burden of self, but the burden is leaking sand. Still too hard to tell what's going on.) I'm still really struggling with color and backgrounds, so the final drawing ended up being much more simple that some iterations (I had one with an industrial city-scape in the background). But it gets the idea across, and that's the important part. Also, the top is highly paraphrased from a sermon that was preached at my church. You can see from the left picture below that it's even more paraphrased now that it was when I first jotted it down, mainly for space reasons. 

This one popped into my head on Sunday after I read Nehemiah 9:17, so I jotted down a quick sketch of the rabbit and snail on the back of a bulletin. This evening (Tuesday) cranked it out in one evening. The whole thing was probably less than two hours, and a chunk of that was figuring out where to put the text. I really love this verse. It shows the character of God in living color.
In retrospect, I probably would use signs instead of banners for the "finish lines" and I wouldn't have the grass overlap the track, but it is what it is. 

My favorite part of this is that my 8-year-old son walked up while I was drawing it and said, "Hey, that's Psalm 103:8," and then proceeded to quote the verse to me: "The Lord is merciful and gracious, Slow to anger, and abounding in mercy." Well, not quite the same reference I was using, but I was still a proud papa. 

This one started out a sketch on a piece of paper. I bumped the contrast and printed it on A4, then light-boxed it, because I didn't have access to my computer then. I inked it after tracing, then when I got back home, I scanned the inked drawing. I made a few changes, like pinching the bottom of the castles to make the match the perspective a little better. The dark castle stayed pretty much the same, but the castle of light went through a few revisions. My wife thought that the original looked a little to orthodox (good guess, the dome was inspired by the Hagia Sophia), and the I tried a classic wooden church, but it looked really out of place. I finally settled on something a little more cathedral-like, but not super fancy. I spend a lot of time trying to hand-letter the verse. Not super excited about the results, but I wasn't sure how to manipulate the font into a curve like I did by hand. The cross was a last-second addition, which I felt really tied the picture together and put the mechanism for our new citizenship front and center. 

This is a quote from C. S. Lewis' character Lucy, in his book The Last Battle, from The Chronicles of Narnia. Near the end of the book, Tirian, last king of Narnia, goes into a stable that was a doorway into another world. There he meets Queen Lucy. 

The whole time I was drawing it, I kept humming, "He's got the whole world, in His hands..." The finished drawing was pretty close to final version. I did try to draw it with no line art at all, just with watercolor, but it didn't turn out well. Something I guess I need to work on. You can see a little of it still in the hay. There was also version with a lot more background detail, but it was distracting and clashed with the text. Finally, I tried the ultra-clean version below, but my wife talked me out of it. :) I'm glad she did.