New Every Morning

I’m so excited to finally be sharing this piece with you all!

Title: New Every Morning

Medium: Graphite on paper

Size: The train drawing is approximately 14″ x 18″; the text drawing is approximately 7″ x 22″

When: December 2014 – February 2015

Time to complete: Over 30 hours between the two drawings

Commissioned by: John Soble, for his and his wife Gretta’s new house.

Thought process: John approached me in church mentioning he wanted a custom, two part drawing for their new house. He wanted a drawing on top and the Lamentations 3:21-24 verse on a separate drawing underneath. The part of the verse “new every morning” really struck a chord with me, and all I could picture was light rays coming in between tree branches. During one of the drawing planning meetings, John mentioned light rays and a train track, and I really liked that idea.

Problems I encountered: Getting the clouds to be dark and stormy while having the sun rays be nice and bright. Getting that balance between the two was really hard!

Trying to figure out a background for the text was challenging. I originally wanted to clouds like in the sky, but that didn’t make sense to have clouds under the train track. I thought about continuing the train track, but depending on what frame and mat the drawing ends up in and the spacing between the two drawings, it could look really really bad if the track didn’t line up just right. I ended up going with a similar gravel design that I used in the train track and am pretty pleased with it.

Favorite part: Everything about the train drawing, even though the clouds still aren’t quite right. Every time I see it I get happy.

Least favorite part: The clouds still aren’t quite right, and I wish I could have figured out a better contrast between the gravel and the text in the text drawing. I couldn’t push it too far as it would take away from the text, but I still feel like it falls a little flat.

Fun tidbits: John and Gretta moved while we were planning this drawing, making design meetings a little challenging. Normally I like to meet in person to discuss ideas and bounce ideas back and forth, but I couldn’t really do that while they were out of state. We did most of our planning online, and one of them was while I was on the way to a Piano Guys concert back in December.

If I’m counting this right, I think this is my fourth piece I’ve done for the Sobles!

John will be getting this custom framed, and I can’t wait to see pictures of it all finished! I’ll share pictures when I get them 🙂

The text drawing is wider than the train drawing; it’s just hard to show that on the blog.

Product availability: Products featuring the train drawing portion of this piece are available here in my Etsy shop.