…from my flickr photostream.

Click on an image to enlarge.

You can also browse and download other sizes of these images on my flickr page.

How to create images like this:

1. Assemble several crazy teenagers willing to work together. This exercise does require teemwork to produce the more complex images.
2. Equip them with a selection of light sources. If you can find some with different colours, that can be useful. The blues in our images come from a lightsaber!
3. Set up a camera on a tripod, as it is important the camera doesn’t move. You need a camera with manual settings control to set an exposure time of about 6 seconds.
4. Turn out most of your lights. It doesn’t need to be completely dark, and in fact it helps to be able to see your camera settings. Images can be manipulated later on your PC to darken background.
5. Get your artists to imagine they are painting with their torches on a large canvas in front of them but in reverse. Start with easy stuff, like writing their name individually, then move on to making images together. Getting one to stand still, while others give them wings or horns can be a fun way to begin. Then we worked through the nativity story and they came up with the ideas.
6. Three, two, one, go…Press the shutter and encourage your artists to fill the canvas and the six seconds with their artwork. Turn torches off when finished, otherwise you get blobs of light!
8. We also had the camera set up plugged into a TV to give the artists some instant feedback on their work. Each image takes several attempts before you get the right picture. Seeign it on a larger screen helps to work out where you are going wrong if your angels look more like clouds.
9. Then use Picassa (or similar) on your PC to make background disappear (we used the shadow slider) and then crop.

vimeo is a community based video sharing site that encourages collaboration and creativity. It is a much friendlier and a significantly more creative community than the likes of YouTube. Since I first discovered vimeo, I have been taking particular note of those videos that inspire living the Jesus way – motion graphics, modern parables and real-life stories that help reflect on what it might mean to be a disciple of Jesus today. So to keep it all tidy, I started a new vimeo channel called LifePixels.

One my latest finds was this parable about finding the perfect church by KORE.

More on the LifePixels channel.

This is just so cool and so beautiful. Sometimes people just need that spark to get going again. Imagine somebody in the park handing you $50 to buy the art materials you need to renew that interest you once had.

It would great to see some of the work that results from this.

Find out more about this at the The Federation of Students and Nominally or Unemployed Artists

There must be some link to this week’s lectionary gospel reading about the vineyard workers.

You’ve got to check this out.

Since the beginning of March this piece of art has been moved each day to a new location in St Helens. Today it sits in Fingerpost, one of the urban priority areas in Helens, just a couple of blocks away from our church. People walk by, not noticing the big sign as it stands proudly announcing the reality of new creation, next to a piece of redundant land.

Heaven continues to appear in St Helens until 3rd May (and hopefully in more obvious ways long after too!). Check the schedules here. By some strange coincidence, the Big Art blog for St Helens is running on WordPress using one of my themes too! I honestly haven’t had anything to do with this project – but I think it is absolutely brilliant.