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. "It seems, then," said Tirian, smiling himself, "that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from without are two different places." 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.
I jotted this sentence down in my quiet time and rediscovered it while I was going back through my notebooks. I really struggled to come up with an illustration. My first thought was trying to stop a vehicle or bulldozer by standing on its hood or blade and pushing at its body. But then I thought, "Well, I couldn't stop those even if I was on the ground." What I needed was an illustration that showed pushing as achievable, but futile in its results. I got the idea for a conveyor belt about half a day later. I guess the guy there could push the box, but he'd have to push it faster than the belt was moving. I did the drawing in Clip Studio. It's going to replace Sketchbook as my go-to for digital, but the learning curve is a lot steeper. I'm using the Frenden watercolor brushes for painting. There was a lot I wasn't super happy with, but I Jake Parker's Finished Not Perfect mantra and drew the line after about three hours of messing around with it. You may be surprised to find that I do all my lettering in PowerPoint. It's weird maybe, but the text tools are pretty powerful. Clip Studio actually is good at this, but I have yet to teach myself how to do it. One other little factoid: I drew the arrows on the conveyor belt in PowerPoint and used the transparency setting to help them blend in. I felt like the picture needed them to make sure the viewer understood what was going on. This cartoon surprised me. I read the quote, had the idea, started drawing Saturday night, and finished it on Sunday. I had a few issues with the perspective, but overall, I think it works. The quote is from Moses Hess' book, Rome and Jerusalem, written after Hess realized the futility of trying to fit in to European culture. Abandoning Judaism, embracing socialism, and even marrying a Catholic did not protect him from anti-Semitism. It seems to me that Hess was pretty spot on. The last thing the world wants is a knock-off of the world. Yet when Christians try to fit in to maintain their level of comfort, that's exactly what they are - counterfeit citizens of the world. We'll never really fit in, and worse, we'll be seen as Christian frauds. The Berlin Wall was a public-relations disaster for communism. How can you sell a worldview as "the best" when you have to build walls to keep people from escaping it? That's what we do to Christianity when we try to fit in to the world. It's signaling that we really like their system better. What many in the world really want is peace, joy, love, purpose, and meaning - to have someone worthy of loving, to serve one worthy of serving. That's what we can offer them, but only when our purpose is aligned, not with the world, but with the Kingdom of God. One little post-script about this drawing. The right-hand side of the drawing got erased a lot, because I didn't know what I wanted there. I tried a city in the clouds, then a city in the clouds with a gate, but they just didn't convey the idea I wanted. Then I thought about Ezekiel's temple. I ended up combining it with the description of the tree in Revelation 22:1-3. I ended up putting a gate back in just to fill in the foreground, but I botched it and had to edit it in the digital scan. |