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To Chapel and Back Again

Anderson University's "Impact Your World Week", 2016.  Design/Paint by Sarah White, Assisted by Abby White
Every year at my alma mater, Anderson University, there are two weeks with double the campus chapels.  One of these, Impact Your World Week, is often headed by a guest speaker on campus.  Instead, in 2016, our campus pastor, Todd Faulker, who is moving on to become a full time professor in the School of Theology in the Fall, headlined a chapel series called To Chapel and Back Again.
 
Pastor Todd, as we all know, loves Lord of the Rings.  He often quotes or references the series in chapels, even eight years ago when I was a studen and he began his tenure as campus pastor.  For To Chapel and Back Again, he chose specific scenes from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy as illustrations for his four sermons that week.
 
In November, he put a shout out on Twitter to AU alum asking to share their favorite AU Chapel Lord of the Rings stories, or favorite Impact Your World Week stories, and then shared what his plan was for the series.  A friend and classmate of mine threw that tweet at me and said "you should help."
 
 
 
Pastor Todd and I tweeted back and forth a few times and emailed about what his vision was for the week, including video clips of the scenes in the movies that he would be showing, and what exactly his sermons would focus on.  From these conversations I designed four banners, one for each book/sermon, using the imagery from the films and drawing from research images that Pastor Todd liked for style.  
 
I was in Indiana for another project in January, but my sister-in-law and fellow artist, Abby White, and I took evening trips from Indianpolis to Anderson to paint the banners, using only 5 colors of paint.  She hand cartooned the images from the renderings after I painted each colored background, and then we painted the detail work together.  Abby also researched J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish script/language to add to our banners as well.
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