Advent Artwork:The Weary World Rejoices

Recent work for my church's advent sermon series, (Highrock Northshore); My pastor asked for a “Dickensonian” feeling illustration of Christmas Carolers singing to a person clearly down on their luck, but who has a smile because they are uplifted by the music and hope that the season offers.

I did a couple of sketches. One was a literal interpretation of the subject, the second was a more symbolic representation of the spirit of the season.

Sketch 1

Sketch 2

Final Art Alternate

Final Chosen Art

 The second, more literal and complex composition
was the one chosen.

The sermon series description is here:
The Weary World Rejoices: stories and songs that remind us to sing
Oh how weary we can be at this time of year.
Weary of mounting bills, mounting debt, mounting inboxes, mounting anxiety about all manner
of things. Weary of the to-dos that never end and the holiday calendar that’s too full. Weary of
the friends who disappoint, the heroes who fall, the leaders who sacrifice principles for
power. Weary of the woes of aging bodies, troubled minds, restless souls—the fallenness of all
things. Oh how weary we often are.
But into all this comes Christ: the once and future Savior who resolves every tension and rights
every wrong. The One who brings justice at last, who makes all things new, and who brings a
light that overcomes all darkness.
For this thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices.
It’s for good reason that during the weariest and dreariest days of the year, we would sing the
most memorable songs ever written — songs that dare us to hope, call us to love, invite us to
rejoice.
And so we invite you to join us this Advent as we take a close look at some of our most
cherished seasonal stories and songs — stories that remind us of the God who is with us and
songs that remind us to sing.

The Dickens You Say!

A client recently hired me to do some Photoshop work on a photo so that it could be printed and given as a Christmas gift. I'm posting this partly to show what I am capable of doing in Photoshop, nothing too fancy, but definitley took an artist's eye.

Here is the original photo. It is a picture of actor J.T. Turner, who does an annual reading of Charles Dicken's "Christmas Carol" as who else, Charles Dickens. He had this lovely photo taken of himself in his 19th-century Dickensian costume, the only problem was the decidedly 20th-century building in the background.























It was fairly easy to isolate the foreground elements and eliminate the background, replacing it with color sampled from the snow shadow area.























So far, so good. Now the client asked me to make it look more like an illustration, similar to a technique that I developed for use on several posters. I couldn't do it by just by running a Photoshop filter on the original photo as that almost always looks like what it is; a Photoshop filter run on a photo. It needed to look more hand drawn than that. I solved the problem by making a line drawing of the photo, tracing a print of the photo on vellum, and then scanning it into Photoshop.























I then selected the white areas of the flat art, inversed the selection so that only the black was selected, and then copied and pasted the black line art onto a new
layer in Photoshop. I then took the original photo, ran a modified watercolor filter on it, and pasted it on the layer beneath the line art. Some areas of the line art did not line up exactly and needed to be modified, as did some of the areas of the underlying photo. For instance the area around the eyes needed to be cleaned up, and the side of the coat extended. Once everything was lined up to my satisfaction, i flattened the document. Here is the finished product.























You get the illustrative style of line art, with the tonal gradations of a photo.