JFlah's Blunders

Ok, so I'm on a snowman kick... gotta draw them to get them out of my system sometimes...

The house is nearly recovered from the flood. Between all of the overtime I've been putting in and staying with family, I've not had as much time since August to work on it as I'd have liked, but I've had some help and finally had a break in my schedule where I could spend some time to wash everything up and finish the walls. Everything is looking good. I've sanded the last bit of drywall mud and caulked the molding and finished painting. Now I've got to finish up all the washing/floors/dusting/cleaning/moving back in stuff. There's still a mountain of work, but I'm super thankful that God's given me parents who are willing to and able to help me (and who didn't mind me staying at their house for weeks while I got things sorted). Thank God for great family! And for how He's given me such great church family! FBCZ has loved on me during this and I can't imagine being any where else. They work me hard in the office - there's a st

Here's the "final" poster design. Might be tweaked a little more, but this is basically it. Made the angels subtle and the nativity prominent. Thankfully the boss was around when I was working on placement of the pieces. He helped me choose three angels and decided he wanted the nativity big. Here's the inspiration:

Here's the nativity sketch - sketched elements separately, scanned them at a high resolution then compiled them into the scenes. Wish I'd had more time to work on these, but I think I've done ok in the time allotted. I'm glad God's given me a place to work that will allow me to do creative things like this even though I still feel a little funny about being found sketching when the boss shows up at the door and says 'what cha' doin?'

Did a lot of angel sketches in prep to put together the Spirit of Christmas design for this year. Here are the most successful ones. Only three made it into the final.

This is a fact that has really helped me put things into perspective. Life stinks sometimes, but as the cliche goes, God's bigger than my problems. Not only that, but He isn't vulnerable like me, doesn't have any of my propensities for failure, He's perfect and He loves me... Such a great God!

This is how I've been feeling - trying to be the best at everything but only having brains enough for one - LOL - yeah, I'm a nut.

Last week I spent an afternoon working on some upcoming designs. The image Pastor sent to me is from here . Someone used it for a nice looking book cover for a family worship topic. After doing the small format designs, I realized that there was no way that tiny image was going to work for the 20x30 poster we need in the ministry center, so I started pulling pieces to put together something that would work in the larger print format. Here's the original that Pastor sent to me - nice huh? It looked blown out but after some quick level adjustments I had a base to work with. This is the final edited version for the HD Slides and another for the 20x30 poster:   Probably could use some more shadow for the hymnal that goes onto the Bible, but I think it's effective enough to pass muster. Wood grain texture that I tiled and color corrected for the replaced table top is here and then the great scratches for the overlay for a more realistic table is here . Here '

Last week I got to do a fun collage for the sermon title imagery. Title was "You Can Be Right and Still Be Wrong" - message was from 1 Corinthians 8 . Here's the final: Banana image borrowed from here . Foot/leg from here . Font: Headline Crack Background is a combination of two images - a concrete wall background and a wood background with some textured layers over the top and some perspective wizardry. The bit that was the most challenging was making the banana look like it was in the scene. As you can see the source image is on a white background and it was lit well. I had to make it look like it fit into the scene I'd created and make sure the shadows were enough to make it look realistic. That was the most fun I've had designing something for work in a while.

Let me just begin by saying how good God's been to me in all of this. He's provided a house that didn't have standing water in it when many of my friends had anywhere from 6" to 6' of water in theirs. My family's homes were unaffected too and if I'd have moved around to figure out what the problem was the last time water got into the house from a rainstorm, I might have escaped this time without damage. My home is on a slanted hill. Water runs from the back of the property to the front and has been getting into the house for goodness knows how long. Wish I knew what to do about it, but am not sure how to start figuring that one out. I'm reluctant to close up the walls before fixing the problem because I don't want to be back in this boat the next time there comes a downpour. Anyhow, here are a few pictures of the wet baseboards. We tore out drywall from four rooms (five if you count that wonderfully huge closet in the bedroom). Thankfully I have t

Did this design for some cut vinyl that will go into our new Ministry Center. Will be black vinyl on a yellowish tan wall. Will take a photo once it's up. Design went through three sketched versions before I landed on something that started to look right to me. All told, the design took more than 20 hours (including the 4 hour sketching time) and I enjoyed each second. Am so glad that I've got Adobe Illustrator to help me digitize the sketch into a vector format - that would've been a bear to do if I'd have had to do all of those points and curves by hand. As it was, I traced the cleaned up sketch scan in illustrator and then got rid of zillions of extra anchor points as I refined it. First version of the trace had girly ribbons with outlines that would've been really difficult to lay in cut vinyl but, the thickened lines aren't too terrible - we'll see how the printer does with it and how much of a monster it is to install.

Bosses decided I needed an iMac but it's been two months and I'm still having  PC to MAC OS pains - mostly in relation to the finder windows. It's been more than a little frustrating not being able to use every file dialog window as I would a typical finder window. That lack of usability is annoying and really slows down my efficiency/organization. Add to it the glitches that Adobe CC has with the Photoshop/Illustrator CC open file dialog window, the gradient swatch window, the save window, etc always opening at a the tiny default size instead of the size I closed it at and I'm pulling out my hair, wondering why I didn't insist on another PC instead of believing getting a MAC was what I needed. I have to say, though, that the "just deal with it" and "Macs aren't PCs" types of responses I typically get in apple "help" forums aren't useful. Not only so, but I can't help but think those posts were written with

This is a calligraphy design I drew for a shirt for our women's ministry trip to the Beth Moore Living Proof Live conference in Mobile this August. They chose a bright turquoise shirt with hot pink ink - am looking forward to wearing one of them, especially since the shirts are super soft (District Made brand style DM108). I highly recommend that shirt type - though the number of available colors is tiny.

Been crocheting a lot of gifts lately and I think it's probably time for me to put away my hooks. This was a house warming present for a co-worker's family. I hope they enjoy it.

This week I took a couple days to work on the VBS backdrops for this year. We're doing Submerged by Lifeway. Typically, they do a good job of providing ideas and resources for the set design for worship rally and the classrooms. I wish the pictures were bigger - it's hard to see many details in the tiny pictures they provide, but it's certainly better than having to start from scratch each time. Anyhow, the VBS director primed the foam board and used the hot knife to cut them out before I got to work. I think they turned out great. We're not quite done. I will try to remember to take a picture of it all installed so you can see all of the finishing touches and such.

It's all over the news today - the nonsense that is the transgender bathroom dictate from the federal government . They've stated that all public schools have to allow boys and girls shower together or they'll pull federal funding. They know that they're declaring war on families and on women with this mandate, but they don't care about people's safety or their right to privacy. All of this stupidity over what is less than one percent of the population . Not only so, if they pull federal funding, it affects the poorest of the poor - it will take away those free school meals, cause that's what the majority of those federal dollars go to. There is more at stake here than just what they deem a compassionate decision in relation to the transgender community - this is something that puts people in danger. This is something that makes it easy for sexual predators to prey on others. Obviously the government believes that if you don't agree wit

Alistair Begg of Truth for Life has a sermon series that inspired this one. I highly recommend listening to those - many of his messages have meat in them you may not always get enough of on Sundays. Another plus is that all of his sermon audio files are free for download.

"Murder sin in its infancy" is a phrase I have oft repeated to myself as a reminder of how quickly thoughts can grow to become actions. If I am merciless with the cute little baby thoughts - thoughts that seem innocent and sweet by killing them in the cradle, then there is no opportunity for that sin to grow into full fledged adult sins with drivers licenses and such that wreak havock within my relationship with Christ. Christ has liberated me from the tyranny of sin by paying the ultimate price - he purchased me and my life and my rights to be the driver of my own life. How can I "add my spittle to those who spat upon the cross" by consciously allowing sin to gain any foot hold in my life? Wish it was always easy to recognize and fight that fight. I cannot do it on my own - it is only through His power that I even recognize anything as sin. He is the one who keeps me on the narrow path and I praise Him for it. [Verse: Colossians 3:5 - and here's an i

Ok, so the ladies' ministry wants a tshirt design and I was wondering if I might could do some typography/calligraphy for the back - this is their verse: Mark 12:30 Used this one as inspiration: And ended up with this: Here's the final photoshopped on top of some stock paper. Has some successful bits and some not so great bits and isn't particularly pretty... I've still got a lot to learn, but am enjoying the process

For the semi-annual car show, we've used a design I made several years ago - at least three or four years ago. Yeah, it's old and so I was hoping I could refresh it. After I created a mark for the event, I got to looking around - found some great wallpaper images of classic vehicles, clipped them out of their backgrounds, added shadows and reflections and ambient color, a background, some filters, and voila! new flyer design. Of course, it took a long time to get everything the way it needed to be since the vehicles were all different sizes and such, but I have to say that I think the new version is a big improvement over the last. Here's the new version:   Here three of the main resource images:  This is the original inspiration for the change of the layout:  Here's the old version: I know - clunky design, right? Loved the picture though.

I'm so terrible at this! Not sure I'm getting any better - actually, I think the attempts are getting worse, but I sure am enjoying myself so I'll probably continue creating these wonderful/terrible little scraps. Didn't plan them out, and used an ink pen, so... yeah, no do-overs here. Might start using pencil to plan the page out a bit better. It's hard to determine where the curly bits go - that and I obviously need to take a look at some reference material. I mean, do I even know what a capital "S" looks like? Attempt number one... was looking at something from here earlier in the day that obviously inspired this. Attempt number 2 Last attempt... looked ok till "stands"... lots of room for improvement here, huh?