Still Making Art

Over the last few weeks or so, I have been spending a lot of time working on building online community and other stuff, so today I had a little bit of a break and I decided to stretch my creative muscled and do a little art. My friends at Kul Pong Klub in Croatia have their creative prompts called Marchartoon. So I decided to make a little art today.
The challenge this year was to combine an animal and a sport. These were fun and a good distraction. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish them all, but I had a good time and they lowered my stress a bit.

You can see the rest at my Beware of Artists Page.

Funny Stuff From the Bible

Okay, it’s not funny “ha-ha” but rather funny “peculiar.” In my devotions I am currently in the book of Exodus. Today I am at the place where God is bringing the plagues against Egypt. What struck me was for the first couple of plagues, after Moses (with God) produces a plague, the magicians of Egypt did the same by their “secret arts.” Think about this for a moment. God sends a plague, and then the magicians through their demonic powers show they can do the same. In other words, every time the enemy acts to show his power, the end result is it just makes things worse. This is pretty much the best the enemy can do, copy from God and make things worse. That’s funny at least to some extent.

Of course eventually even the magicians are brought to their knees by the plagues as well and then this struck me. The end result of the plagues was the passover and the freedom of the people. The passover was preparatory for the coming of Jesus and in this we see a major truth, even the punishing acts of God end up working for the good, because God is always good. That may not be funny, but it ought to put a smile on your face.

Influences…

All us creatives are the product of our influences. When I was a little kid, My Nana used to take me to this amazing flea market/auction and there was this one stand that had this array of t-shirts. There were many difference designs but most of them were the same subject matter, cars twisting under the torque of their massive engines with huge monstrous beastly characters sticking right through the roof of the car grasping a huge shifter. We’d leave that stand and Nana would take me to another stand where she’d let me buy a model kit of my church. I loved building those kits and I dreamed of being able to to make them look like those shirts at the shop. One of the things I really wanted to draw was those crazy creatures and I started and I have been drawing creatures ever since.

I also remember being in elementary school and checking a book out of the library about custom cars. There was this guy in it that was building these amazing cars. One of those cars was called the Mysterion. It turned out that the builder was a guy named Ed “Big Daddy Roth. Later, I found out that he was also the artist behind many of those amazing T-shirts. The guy was clearly an influence. One of many. Of all his creatures, probably the most famous was RatFink this big green rat. My wife got me this guy for Christmas and the spare time in my week off has been spent building and painting him for. It was a fun kit to paint and it reminded me of another reason I ended up creating.

Who influenced you?

CREACHER Preview: Jesus is Greater

This week, I decided to just lay it all out there over at my cartoon site, CREACHER. Jesus is Greater… For more info, click the toons.

I Want It All…

I started to think about what it means to have it all. This set of Creacher toons spells it out,

Thing I Know Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt

While I’m on a cartooning kick, I thought I’d share a little preview of Creacher. Sometimes the words come first, but in this case I just started off by drawing the characters and let them speak. I just started to look at the things I know and the things I wanted to share. These are some of the things I know and now you know them too.

Quotable…

Spoiler alert…
If you subscribe to my webcomic Creacher, you may not want to look at this post, or maybe you’ll want to take the sneak peak.
I started off thinking I was going to do a lot of quotes from other people and decided I would just do my own. These are some heartfelt (and hopefully humorous or thought provoking) ideas that I hope will touch and bless you.

If you don’t subscribe to my web comic, now here’s your chance.

Hittin’ the Word

What do you do when you’re out of ideas and you need to create. One of my favorite things is to hit the Scriptures. Case in point, this week I was having difficulty coming up with the content for next week’s Creacher cartoons. Where oh where could I find short pithy sayings for cartoon “gags.” Well considering I want them to be humorous but with a solid point, why not the book that holds some of the great wisdom of all time, the book of Proverbs? I am reading through them as part of my devotions right now and before long I had a week’s worth of cartoons written and ready to go.

The Word of God is a great source for Christian creative projects of all kinds. The trick though is knowing what’s in there and where you can find it. Of course there are tons of sources for finding what you’re looking for in the Bible, but there is one thing that will trump them all…

Picking it up and reading it.

So Hit the Word. You’ll be glad you did.

Refiring Creacher Toons

My church is doing trunk or treat and I decided to decorate my trunk with one of my favorite things to create, creatures. I have always loved making creatures because the possibilities are endless. You can literally create anything you want. For the longest time I could not see how this connected with my faith, but then one day I was preparing to preach in a “King James Only” church. My text revolved around 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation…” Well in the King James, “new creation” is translated “New Creature.” There was my answer. I could use the creatures I create to talk about being a new creature in Christ. After a few false starts, I settled on the name CREACHER because it combined Creature and Preacher, and also it had reacher in the name and that was my intent, to use creachers to reach people for the Kingdom. Well I decided to ramp up CREACHER and give out cards to the site along with my candy. The new version includes a meme, a coloring sheet and a color download available free on the site. You can see them for yourself at the CREACHER website along with my pop art and some other cartoons.

IllustrationFriday.com Challenge: Suspense

This one made me think of the old joke:
Q: “How do you keep an idiot in suspense?”
A: “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
I know it’s a little mean and yet it’s funny in a strange sort of way. It’s a little deception, a little bait and switch, a set up. You bite on this one thinking you are going to hear a funny joke, but you don’t realize that if you fall for the joke, you will be the butt of it. Fall for it and you get burned.

That’s sort of how sin is. You bite on temptation thinking you are going to experience some pleasure. but if you fall for it, you get burned by it. There are lots of set ups in life that aren’t funny at all. Be careful what you fall for. Temptation can leave you feeling like an idiot.