God is With Us

At a 2018 Worship Symposium workshop, painter and calligrapher Matt Plescher (mattplescher.com) showed participants how to do brush calligraphy. With Plescher’s permission, his work “God is with us” is adapted here for an Advent/Christmas visual. His original art is available free of charge at viascriptura.com.

Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

As any marketer or communications professional will tell you, an integrated campaign will be more effective or “stick” better than a hodgepodge of words, images, and graphics. Fortunately, this block of gothic letters holds together beautifully and would be easily adapted to a variety of uses: large sanctuary graphics, projection, and any kind of printed materials.

The four short words help avoid the legibility problem gothic fonts have in longer texts because of the repeating strokes.

Handwriting

The brush strokes of the original lend a hand-wrought feel to the text that would be hard to pull off in fabric, wood, or foamcore. For that reason—and again, with the artist’s permission—I filled in the brushstrokes by hand and scanned the result for these uses. Use the brushstroke version where you can, though, so people can see the original, which I think is more interesting than this flat, filled-in version.

Light It Up

At the risk of this design appearing a little too mystical, if your space and environment is right I can imagine this letter block being cut out of foam core and hung in front of a wall of the same color. Use strip LED lighting on the backside of the letters—when lit the letters will stand out from the background. But this might be too much for your space or your worshipers. Use your good judgment.

Dean Heetderks is a member of Covenant Christian Reformed Church in Cutlerville, Michigan, and art director of Reformed Worship. Show and tell him about your experiences at dean.heetderks@gmail.com.

Reformed Worship 129 © September 2018, Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Used by permission.