Paint and Pray Artists

Some of the participants had NEVER painted before or drawn in their lives. Participants for the 16 week program ranged from 12 to 94 years of age.  All walks of life were represented as they joined in one common purpose to "Paint and Pray". 

Art Exhibit

The culminating project was a painting expressing the theme of "Creation".  Those works, along with other works created were displayed in a showing at the church and a reception held for the artists.  Over fifty people came through touring the work, hearing about the program and meeting the artists. Several works sold with all or part of the proceeds going back to fund the program.

The Journey

Art Hacks: Water Containers

You have no money for trips to the nearest hobby store, so how do  you create a convenient water container? How do you come up with a good means to remove excess water from a brush. It is cheap and effectively free; you are reusing something found or purchased.

Take an empty plastic container, such as one that icing for cake comes in, and cut a small open slit in the lid.  This gives us an easy to carry water source. It also helps prevent too awful a consequence if it tips over due to wind, children, movement or other reason.

Inspiring Reads: Our Incredible Journey

Our Incredible Journey. By Tonya Holmes Shook and Clarence Wade Shook ( Tonya Holmes Shook, Publishing Coordinator, 2013).  ISBN: 978-1494424121

 

 Tonya Holmes Shook  resides in Texas and in this volume she shares - visually - a history of artistic development and expression.  It is a visual memory of life lived, choices made, dreams generated, and a faith that was always whispering to the people involved, sometimes in spite of themselves.

 

" During our thirty-six years together never have we had a creative void...this book consists of many things that we call a creative force from God to achieve things never once dreamed possible or even thought of for that matter. The glory is His." (pg. 4)

 

If you like history, art, creative expression, and biography, you will enjoy this volume. Multi-talented Tonya Holmes Shook and her talented spouse Clarence Wade Shook,          share the very human progression of a journey through artistic expression: art, weaving, pottery, several novels and then again to art in a full circle that I rich in the challenges of life, the stories we inherit and make, and the way that art reflects the soul of the person producing every brush stroke or every word.

 

A good addition to art collections, biographies, and so many other areas. She shares that the destination is never as important as what you do with the journey and as such it is inspiring. 

 

Tonya Holmes Shook's writings include: The Drifters, Canady: The Los Shanty boat Man; Anyone Can Be a Wool Spinner, No Soft Place To Fall, Displaced Cherokee, God's Breakfast Nook, and a Portrait of Christ.  Clarence's works include: Used and Forgotten: A Photographic Journey; The Magnificent Mesquites of Synder.

 

See a sample of her art here.

Art Hacks: Homemade Paint

Many of these links are for use with children but may provide a starting place for economical do it yourself paints to practice with as you learn.  It might also entertain children in the process!

Homemade Watercolor Paints from Flowers.

DIY recipes for painting and art for children. Also, here. This one shows a wider range of possible mediums as well.

Frida Kahlo's DIY Paint Recipe

Homemade salt and flour paint suitable for children

A Lesson in Trees

Jeremiah 17:8
For   you who love and follow God will be "as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit."