This is the project I'm working on right now - well, one of my projects - for my Illustration: Tools of the Trade class. We're using gouache, which looks to me very much like paint designed to be used for people who use ink most of the time. In other words, it seems like it might be a medium that I may take to. I certainly hope so; I'll find out this weekend how comfortable I am with it. In general, I'm not a big fan of painting, but I'd really like to find a method to color my work that I'm happy with (especially if I don't have access to a Photoshop-like program).



This guy is the focus of the picture; in the finished version, he'll be up over a distant patchwork of farmland and highway, with a distant city far below him. The task we were given was to create a picture that worked with the theme "Floating In Mid-Air." In my original thumbnail sketches I came up with a variety of things; my original intention was to do a steampunk-looking zeppelin with Edwardian/Art Nouveau flourishes. That morphed into a WWII pulp hero straddling the side of a zeppelin with a Messerschmitt flying toward him. But even as I was sketching these, the specific term "mid-air" stuck in my mind, and I couldn't help but draw allusions to the Rapture spoken of in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18 ("For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.") and Matthew 24:39-41 ("...and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left."). I sketched out two versions of this, one with only a single person, and one with hundreds of people in the air. My teacher liked the Rapture sketch with the single person, so that's what I'm going with.

As I was drawing it, I started to think about what the guy's expression would be. I went with what I think I would feel were I to be raptured: terror, awe, and wonder. I have a fear of heights, but I love to fly in jets; I have dreams of flying all the time, but I know that I'd be absolutely frightened out of my mind. I mean, here you are, about whatever business you do during the day (or the night), talking to someone, typing on the computer, whatever, and - WHOOSH! - you're hurtling through the air, the comfort of earth far below you, soaring through the clouds into the frigid blue sky, as if the earth had suddenly lost its gravitic grasp on your body. The few depictions of this event that I've seen seemed so serene, with people smiling and looking heavenward as if they were snuggling in for a cozy Sunday afternoon nap. And it's entirely possible that that's how it will be, I suppose - perhaps we'll feel the reassuring presence of Christ even as we hurtle up to meet him in the air. But look at every depiction of humans' encounters with God or even with angels, from Abraham onward, and you'll see reactions of abject fear, people throwing themselves face-down into the dirt, people fearing for their lives. As much as I look forward to being in the presence of God, I'm almost certain that my initial reaction at being ripped out of my mundane, naturalistic lifestyle and held before the Divine Creator will be something quite literally like mortal terror.

Fear of the Lord isn't a bad thing; while the Bible urges it as a virtue in this earthly life, it seems to me that it may also be a natural consequence of our cosmic situation when you're actually confronted with Him...