His Kingdom Come Blog Hop

Welcome to a very exciting blog hop.  Today we are celebrating the launch of a brand new online Christian Creative Community: His Kingdom Come.

This is an online Community where fellow Christians can encourage, share and learn about Christianity and explore the God-given creativity that he has put in us all.  It will be a safe place to share your faith, be inspired, and explore creativity across many art mediums - journaling, mixed media, painting, bible journaling, textiles, watercolor and more.  His Kingdom Come will offer free tutorials, technique classes, devotionals, crafts to celebrate the holidays, opportunities to go deeper in your faith and in your knowledge of God and the Bible.   The website will also offer Christian artists a platform to host classes (free or fee-based) which you will be able to sign up for.

A team of talented Christian artists have come together to launch this exciting new community.  This blog hop is your chance to get to know them.

It doesn’t matter where you start within the blog hop.   Or you can start at the beginning with Diane.  Each blog has the complete list of participants.

DianeMarra

Bernice Hopper

Mary Brack

Marjolaine Walker

Merri Dennis

Justine Dandrea

Libbi Byrd Corson
Anita Van Hal

Shonna Bucaroff

As you visit each blog you will be given a letter eg. D.   When you have collected all the letters they will make a word.  When you have worked out the word email Bernice (hkcbloghop@gmail) with the word.  We will randomly choose 3 people who have the correct answer to win a prize.   All entries must arrive by Noon (Pacific time) on Monday 3^rd November.

The letter to collect from my blog is O

Let me introduce myself:

I live in Toledo, OH, have been married to Bob for 23 years, and we have two grown daughters and two step-grandsons. I have been a Christ-follower for 26 years. For the past 12 years I have worked in full time ministry at our church as the Executive Director and the Director of our outreach ministries. 

Below you will find some questions each of the blog hop participants will be answering:

1. How does your faith impact your creativity?  

When I got connected to art journaling it opened up a new life of creativity for me. God has used art journaling in my life as another spiritual practice. It has become another way of drawing me near to Him. Madeleine L'Engel says, "Art is incarnational." Art, whether in word or image, helps me put form to what is inside my heart and mind. When I take what I am seeing in Bible study and prayer and express it visually it is planted in my heart and mind more fully. Art becomes another tool used by God for spiritual transformation in my life.

Bible study art journal page

2. What is your preferred medium of creativity? What appeals to you about this? 
Art journaling is my main medium of creativity. I am drawn to it by the opportunity to practice so many different art mediums within this one world: collage, lettering, mixed media, painting, memory keeping, etc. I can spend hours painting backgrounds, cutting and gluing paper or writing out quotes and Scripture. Lately I have delved deeper into collage and am exploring different ancient art forms in modern ways, such as mosaics with magazine paper or painted papers.

Mosaic background from magazine pages

3. What other areas of creativity do you dabble in? 
Decorating, photography, making travel journals. Being in nature is a form of creativity for me. I enjoy altering photos and making digital art in PSE. I also make my own journals from old books. I enjoy this so much I started an Etsy shop a year ago in order to do something with the many, many books I pick up at book sales.

Digital art

4. What is your role within the His Kingdom Come group? 
I will be helping with the Take Me Deeper devotionals and participating in various ways with Logos365 and other projects. I hope to contribute tutorials and classes as well. I will also serve as one of the moderators for the Faith Art Journaling group.

5. What are your hopes for this new community? 
For me, faith and creativity are so intertwined and I hope this community will be a place to connect with others who feel the same way. A place where we can share our creativity and our faith stories and find encouragement, support, prayer, and friendship. A place where we get more in touch with our Creator and with how we have been and are being made in His image. I hope it will be a place where people can come and explore, connect more with their own creativity and with the God who loves them so very much. A place where we can find prompts and challenges to stir our creative juices as well as a place of learning, whether it's art techniques or Bible study skills or spiritual practices that help position ourselves for God's transforming work in our lives.

6. Where to find me: 

• Here on my blog! www.mewithmyheadintheclouds.blogspot.com ~ you can follow me by email or Google+ on the right column.
• Instagram
• My Etsy shop : {found on brighton}
• Facebook: Mary Brack
• Flickr: marynbtol

I hope you are as excited as I am at being part of this online venture.  Our vision is to build an online community not just be a project-led site.  A place where you can find encouragement, share your heart and your problems and find help.

To join our community please visit His Kingdom Come

And now for a peak at the prizes for our three giveaway winners!

If you haven't already been there, your next stop is Marjolaine Walker.

End of Summer

The past few weeks I've been busy working on some projects for family members. My niece is getting married in October and I made her invitation.

I made an altered book art journal for my sister for her birthday.

We had a great weekend with family at the lake.

A great way to end the summer.

Autumn Love

I love Autumn. I love the colors. I love the transformation that takes place to nature's landscape day by day. This year seems especially colorful with vibrant orange and red trees. I spent some time this weekend playing with recent pictures of the season.

 

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree”  ~Emily Bronte

Beginning

The first chapter of Inner Excavate is titled "I Begin". Using this as the prompt for my first few pages, I begin the journey of recording my journey of intentional self-discovery through art journaling and photography.

The little envelope holds a page of journaling about beginning.

David Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself

This is going to be good. Pulling together the pieces and threads of my journey. It's an opportunity to reflect on where I've been and where I am now. To take a closer look at what I've discovered about myself and about God along the way.

Is It Just Me?

Last night we had a long overdue date night and went to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. It was excellent. I think is was just as good as the first, maybe even better. While the special effects were great, the action riveting, and the story entertaining, the thing that captivated me the most was.....the artwork and the FONTS during the ending credits. I recall the same thing happened during the first movie. I couldn't find any images from the new movie, but the same type of artwork and fonts were used in the first:

I love the sketchy, watercolor, grunge feel with the ink spatters. And the font is to die for.
The very same thing happened to me at the end of Robin Hood (2010).

I think I have a serious typography obsession; a font addiction; a graphic arts infatuation. My attention gets diverted from magazine ads, commercials, mail, movies, etc. by the fonts they use. So, am I alone in this? Is it just my own weird obsession? Or am I maybe closer to normal than I think I am?  {At least with other creative types.} If you go see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows stay for the 8 minutes of credits. The art and the fonts are worth it!

Random Thoughts Today

Some rambling random thoughts for today:

{Taken at Youth Haven Ranch July 2011}

This is one of my favorite photo shots from 2011 and it seems an appropriate photo for today, Martin Luther King Jr. day.  Yesterday in church we read Dr. King's speech "Paul's Letter to American Christians".  In this speech he talks about Sunday morning being the "most segregated hour of Christian America". Dr. Kind delivered this speech in 1956 and I hope that now, 56 years later, this is becoming less true of the American Christian church. I'm afraid, though, that we still have a long way to go. But there are changes. There is growth. I'm pleased that it is changing in my own church. And the children are leading us! This is what the above picture represents for me. Young children don't care about the things that tend to separate us as adults. They're just looking for someone to be a friend with. May we learn from them and from Dr. King.
"I still believe that love is the most durable power in the world. Over the centuries men have sought to discover the highest good. This has been the chief quest of ethical philosophy. This was one of the big questions of Greek philosophy. I think I have an answer America. It is love.  This principle stands at the center of the cosmos. As John says, "God is love." He who loves is a participant in the being of God. He who hates does not know God. It is here we find the true meaning of the Christian faith. This is at bottom the meaning of the cross...."  (from Paul's Letter to American Christians)

"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." John 13:34-35

************

I am determined that I WILL FINISH my Advent Art Journal, even if it takes me till spring. I am almost all the way through the first three weeks. Recent pages completed:

I'm loving collaged and painted backgrounds right now. I find that when I simply set out to make some background pages, the creativity flood gates open wide!

As usual, I am involved in multiple things at the same time. I am taking a year long class with Stephanie Ackerman that mixes faith, art journaling, doodling, and soul searching. January's prompt is "Being honest with yourself". My cover page for January:

Scripture on the tag is 1 Thessalonians 5:23: "May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Enough rambling for one day. :)



Art Journaling: A Perfect Mix

Over the past few years I have begun to really get in touch with who I am in Christ ~ mainly how God has wired me: my personality, gifts, what energizes me and what drains me. The more I figure this stuff out the better I learn the most effective ways to find some balance in my busy life, which will, hopefully, keep burn-out from creeping in {or at least not as often}. Through this process the world of art journaling opened up to me and I found an incredible venue for "filling" the spaces in me that have been drained each week/month through the daily struggles, stresses, ups, and downs of life and ministry. If you are familiar with the practice of lectio divina, then you have an idea of how art journaling flows for me - Bible study, meditation, prayer, then I journal (written) for a while, and then I express myself in art for a while. It may or may not be connected to what I studied, but it relaxes me, energizes me, and refills the dry places within me. It also combines many creative areas that I dabble in: paint, paper,  Photoshop, color, photography, typography, collage, words, images, etc. {I have never been satisfied with being fully, exclusively in just one creative area.} I have found over the past two years that it is the process of making art that holds the restorative, energizing and filling qualities for me. So I may or may not finish things and I create with being creative as myonly purpose.

I am driven by the interweaving of my faith and my art. After all, in following Christ, we are striving to live our whole life, our whole being, as a reflection of Him incarnated in us. So why would our hobbies not be an expression of that. I am amazed how time spent studying the Word and time spent doing art have very similar effects on me spiritually.

Creativity

Epiphany

This morning I experienced an epiphany: I learned what Epiphany actually means to the church and the church calendar. I don't remember learning about Epiphany growing up Catholic. It may have been talked about, but I just don't remember it. Since I committed to following Christ as my Savior and Lord in my late 20's, I have been a part of non-liturgical churches. In recent years our church has been getting in touch with some of the traditions that would be more familiar in liturgical churches, such as Advent. Most of my adult life, and especially in the years I've been a Christ-follower, I've had a negative reaction to church/faith traditions or liturgies. My experiences growing up Catholic, and maybe even more specifically some of the experiences my family experienced in the Catholic church, gave me an oversensitivity to what I felt was hypocrisy. And this is how I saw the Catholic church and many of its rituals which felt like they were done without meaning or understanding. Liturgies that were practiced on Sunday morning in mass but not lived out by people throughout the rest of their week. That was my experience and perception. So, since then I have "reacted" to liturgical practices. But in recent years God has been redeeming this in me. As I actually learn the meaning of some of these practices, liturgies, and church traditions I find myself connecting to the depth and richness they hold for our faith in Christ. This year I have more deeply connected with the practice of following Advent ~ anticipating the arrival of our Messiah and celebrating the joy of Emmanuel - God with us - the Incarnation.

So, this morning I stumbled on the meaning of Epiphany, as today is the Epiphany holiday celebrated in the Church calendar. Epiphany is the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi. The day when the Magi visited the baby Jesus in the manger in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1-12). 

In the words of Christine Sine {godspace.wordpress.com}

"We have watched and waited through Advent, we have celebrated Christmas and the joy of our Savior's birth and now we are being asked to follow, to recognize the revelation of Christ in our midst and journey into the new life he offers us."

Come and see, come and follow, go and tell others.

A page from my Advent Art Journal

My Head in the Clouds

I have an obsession with clouds.

I'm always looking at them.

And taking pictures of them.

And making art with them.

For me, clouds reveal God's artistic nature in His creation. Form may very well follow function, but in God's creation, form is beautiful as well as functional.

Art is Incarnational.

“…To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity.”  Creating art is taking Love, Truth, the spiritual, and making them ‘in carne’–in the flesh.  Creating art is taking Love, Truth, the spiritual, and incarnating them that we might see them and experience them more clearly.

Madeleine L'Engle, Walking On Water: Reflections On Faith and Art

In the beginning God created. God is the Creator. We are created in His image. Thus, we also are creators. Whether we are decorating or working with wood, baking or planting a garden, quilting or taking a photo, restoring a car or painting a picture ~ we are creating. Some call these things hobbies. Some call them work. Others call them play. But in them all we are expressing something of God in us.

Over the past few years I have explored art journaling and have found a place where I can create and express myself. It combines the many things I like to dabble in ~ collage, painting, photography, paper arts, digital art. It has brought new expression to journaling by adding image and texture.  Drained by the stress of daily life and ministry, art journaling has become something that replenishes me.  And it has given me new ways to express my thoughts, my ideas, my creativity and my faith. 

Yesterday, on Christmas Sunday, we completed the season of celebrating the incarnation ~ Advent. God came to earth in the form of a baby. God expressing himself in human form~visible. Art helps us express who we are: our emotions and feeling, our character, our faith, our struggles,  joys, pains, experiences ~ how we see life. 

This blog is a place for me to share my art, my thoughts, and how I view life.