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. 

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.  

I made this one after listening to an interview between Shawn Wilson of Rev Reads (a great book review YouTube Channel) and a bunch of contributors to the book "Forged from Reformation." The book argues (in one essay) that Plymouth Brethren notable John Nelson Darby was the Martin Luther of the Anglican Church, and in many ways Darby's journey mirrors that early reformer's journey. During the interview, Shawn asked the men this question: "If you could make a Mt. Rushmore of the Reformation, who would be on it?" The answer to that question inspired the above drawing. If you can't figure them out, from left to right it's Wycliff, Luther, Calvin, and Darby. 

I sketched this with pencil, then used a light-board to transfer the sketch to watercolor paper. I then inked it and colored it with Copic markers. After scanning, I made a few digital adjustments. Specifically, I moved Darby's ear, added a texture layer, and colored the sky with some digital watercolor. 

A couple of other facts: First, this picture was used in the second part of the aforementioned interview, as seen in the thumbnail below. Second, it's the first (and so far only) picture I've ever drawn that has been framed. I sent it to a scholarly acquaintance on Twitter, a Darby fan who I've never met in person, and he put it on his wall! That version doesn't have the digital adjustments.