You Are Unique... ish

I was an award-winning art minor in college. To be fair, the art department was pretty small and I bribed my art professor (JUST KIDDING!). Artists are notoriously hard on their own work, but I was actually pretty happy with some of it. These days, I would not personally display my work, but despite my best efforts at discouraging it, my wife has littered our walls with them. If you ever come over for CG you can see it.

One of the activities a person does in art is draw... a lot. I drew hundreds of still lifes, figures, and copied many classic works. All in an effort to understand, see, and reproduce the world accurately.

For me, the most difficult subject to draw is a person. First, the human body is complex (Just look at even really talented artists, they'll avoid hands like the plague). Second, we are really skilled at seeing when something is off about a human figure. This ability to intuitively know the human form is what contributes to the uncanny valley effect you see in movies like the Polar Express. When there's just something dead about their eyes and movements.

You are special and unique... but not that unique. To help streamline drawing humans you learn that every person has certain shared characteristics with almost every other human. For instance, you can divide the face into eight sectors with four lines (example below). Each of those lines and sectors allows you to proportion the face properly. One of the coolest tricks I learned about human anatomy is that the average head is the distance of five eyeballs across. So if you want to place the eyes in the right place and at the right size, sketch five equally sized eyes and the second ones to the outside will be in the right place and right size. Every human face is just riffing off these average characteristics of anatomy and then adapted to different features. This concept contributes to how a Nintendo Mii can both look like a cartoon and you at the same time. Wild huh? These same tricks exist for every part of the human body.

Just like humans have certain characteristics that make us look human, followers of Christ have certain characteristics that make us look like Jesus. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sketches the anatomy of the Kingdom person. It's these characteristics that can help us understand what following Jesus really looks like. This is what I call, looking like a kingdom person.

I hope you'll join us as we learn together what it means to be a citizen of God's beautiful kingdom through Jesus' sermon on the mount.