Five years after they trusted me with their first visual identity and signage needs, my dear friends at Living Water OPC brought me a photo of their undecorated sanctuary and their plan to begin celebrating the centuries-old Christian calendar together. The tradition of draping the church in white for Easter and Christmas, blue for Advent, purple for Lent, and green for the time in between has existed since at least the third century, but Living Water had just begun considering how to incorporate this custom into their own worship. Here’s how we worked together to illustrate their expression of an ancient devotional practice with a project that was equally illustration of religious literature, interior space design, and textile installation art.

Project Gallery

Illustration, Installation, and a Millennia-Old Cycle

From Living Water

The practice of the Christian liturgical year has existed continuously within the church since at least the third century AD. From about the sixteenth century, though, the historical influences that eventually fed the formation of Living Water have downplayed both devotional traditions like the church calendar and the use of visual art as an aid to worship. As heirs of both traditions, the elders of Living Water set out to create a very new and specific balance between centuries-old ideas.

The Content Brief

From an illustration standpoint, that meant expressing their thoughts and goals in a way that was neither a reproduction of existing imagery nor a departure from the interpretations and commitments that already shaped their practice of worship. This had to be rooted in Scripture, but not an illustration of a Biblical scene. It had to be focused enough to convey the devotional goals of each season, but not so propositional that it overpowered other elements of worship. This was not going to be half interior decor and half devotional literature–it was going to be 100% both.

To my surprise, they decided to offer me a lot of freedom in shaping their goals into a visual concept–most of the imagery and metaphor that appear in the finished piece came from my own research, and stayed central to the project from the first proposal to the final install.

The Creative Brief

The visual design trustees had also put a lot of thought into the goals and limitations of the project before they brought the brief to me. The nave of the Living Water sanctuary features red brick walls with prominent central windows. A wooden cross hangs in front of the windows and matching choir rails provide a low backdrop, while the ceiling is a darker wood paneling. The hangings themselves had to follow the colors of the liturgical year, but there was some concern that certain seasons would clash badly with the red-orange upholstery. Finally, they hoped to stretch their limited decoration budget by making progress on several visual goals in a single project. Their wishlist: add contrasting texture to the hard brick and glass, unify the harsh vertical lines of the upper nave with the harsh horizontal lines of the nave at eye-level, absorb some of the stray acoustics from the instruments, establish a seasonal color palette (that isn’t always red-orange) for the room, and create a reference to older, more elegant church architecture without adding dissonantly “historic” objects to the space.

And, if possible, they’d like it to resemble traditional stained glass.

Technical Considerations

With a long wishlist and a small budget in hand, it’s tempting to go straight to a sketchbook and try to make a concept so strong that it impresses everyone and doesn’t need much production. More than a decade of doing prepress for myself and other designers has taught me that this is the very worst approach. To a low-budget project places all the pressure on you, the designer, to know the simplest solution and to finesse every detail in it. And to do that, you have to start with a very clear idea of exactly what kind of object you’re going to deliver at the end of the day.

Longevity

In budgeting for the banner project, the building and design trustees planned for this project to provide the backbone of the sanctuary’s decoration for 8-10 years. This isn’t a long lifespan for a logo redesign, but it is a long time for a single printed object. To get anywhere close, the finished piece needed to be resistant to deterioration from UV light, substantial enough not to be snagged on the brick wall or blown into the heat from a candle when the air conditioning came on, light enough not to be stretched or torn under its own weight, and designed for a location that’s mostly out of people’s way. In addition, it has to be constructed durably enough to be taken down for storage and unfolded for display several times a year for a decade–to be safe, let’s say it gets handled at least 100 times.

Quite apart from the physical longevity of the object, the design longevity is usually linked to the “timelessness” of the media. This meant that many of the durable, printable media that we associate with high-speed messaging and frequent updates would be a mistake. The final outcome needed to read clearly as furniture, not as promotional graphics. As the project progressed, we eventually decided to add a table runner for the central altar to the set of hangings for each season. The congregation would interact with the table runner every single week, which added more pressure to the choice of materials. Now we didn’t just need it to look like an heirloom, we needed it to feel like one as well.

Cost and Availability

I definitely did more research locating a production method for this project than I did in refining a concept, and all of my research actually landed me directly back where I started. In my initial quote and timeline, I assumed that I would be tackling most of the physical production by myself in my own studio. After ordering dozens of swatches from every print supplier I’ve ever used, I concluded that the readily available materials all felt too much like a trade show and too little like a lived-in space. Custom cut-and-sew work is available for fashion and upholstery applications, but the typical minimum order for these services is usually between two hundred and one thousand identical items. In the research process, I discovered that there’s a thriving printing, cutting, and sewing industry that serves the marching band community almost exclusively. They weren’t able to commit to the level of precision I needed for this project, but if I ever need 400 ripstop flags and want each one to be slightly different, I’ll know who to contact!

We at last decided that the one-off nature of the project warranted using a direct-to-consumer approach. We’d order the fabric stock custom-made from Spoonflower, a print-on-demand company that caters to quilters and indie pattern designers. I would handle the creation of the final, physical objects in my studio. Since textile art is one of the only things I’ve been doing longer than print production design, I was confident that I could manage physical production, but I doubted that Spoonflower’s printing technology would give me the range and subtlety of color reproduction that I wanted. (You can skip forward to the prepress phase to hear how that all worked out!)

Concept Development, Research, and Refinement

Content

Opinions vary as to how much of your own interests you should bring to a client’s design process. As far as I’m concerned, your experience as both a human and an artist are your greatest asset to get a job done reliably and well, and you’re probably performing at your best when the things you’ve studied and practiced the most come to the forefront in a project’s direction. After all, your clients choose you for a reason.

In addition to having been the design lead for Living Water’s very first visual identity and signage projects (all of which are still in use), I was one of the first members of Living Water as a church plant, and–true story–one of the elders overseeing the sanctuary project is my dad. This is how I came to know that Jesus’s metaphor of running water to refer to his own presence isn’t just the name on the door–it’s been central to the mission of this particular congregation since the beginning. Combining this with my fascination with ecology, my experience as a nature illustrator, and my fondness for wordplay, I couldn’t resist illustrating the annual liturgical cycle as the (Living) Water Cycle.

Of course, the elders and trustees of the church didn’t just support the idea because it’s a great pun. Actually, the dozens of water metaphors in the Bible happened to align neatly with the Church calendar. The prophet Isaiah says that the success of the word of the Lord is as constant and formative as the water cycle, and that’s the hope that fuels the elders and congregation of Living Water every week. As the concept took shape, we decided that the green banner of Ordinary Time should reference the quiet waters in David’s famous Psalm 23 and the river of Zion that forms the backbone of life in the new creation. The navy banner of Advent would reflect on the call of the prophets to all Israel and the whole world–poetically put, “the way of the sea” and “the coastlands”–to wait for the coming messiah, and the white banner for Christmas and Easter would draw on the way water ascending as a cloud serves as a constant visual accompaniment to presence of God ascending or descending in glory. The inspiration for the purple Lent banner comes from tiny references assembled from all over the Old Testament, but the one that sparked the idea in the first place was actually a proverb that expresses constant irritation as “the continual dripping of water.”

Style

Choosing what degree and style of abstraction to use in rendering all this water turned out to be the easy part. There was no reason not to lean into the stained-glass inspiration laid out in the brief, so the juxtaposition of solid outlining and jewel-toned cells was the start. The architecture of the nave was also an important factor: the entire building is mid-century, so if I was going to use an architecture reference in the sanctuary artwork, I needed to refer to one of architecture styles of the 20th century. The arts and crafts and art nouveau movements both featured some fantastic stained glass, and designers like Charles Rennie and Margaret McDonald Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Hector Guimard have had a long-lasting influence on my own work.

Just like that, I had a plan: I would draw not-glass stained glass featuring art nouveau-inspired water, four times in a row.

Sketching, Revision, and Final Artwork

Concept Art

I started drawing this project from a digital comp. Since I was working to coordinate with an existing space, I wanted to know as soon as possible what kinds of shapes worked and didn’t, what scale the pattern elements should be, and how saturated different colors would appear in context. The final composition for the first pair of banners took shape gradually as I explored ways to render different curved and pointed elements using the logic of cut glass design.

To help me read the room (literally!), I created a Photoshop template that placed my working drawings into a photo of the sanctuary, refreshing it each time I saved my working file. This is where I realized that the installation as a whole would be a more stable composition if we added the table runner element. It wasn’t in the budget, but Living Water was my church for years: I would draw it just because I wanted to, if they could find the funds for the extra printing.

With a handful of shapes in a rough photoshop mockup, I was ready for some feedback on my proof of concept.

Feedback

The reception for my first sketch was surprisingly warm: those who were concerned with the content and meaning of the series saw strong potential in my use of symbolism and abstraction, those whose previous experience of church decoration had left them a bit on edge about the project were able to start getting excited for the results after seeing a photographic mockup.

The biggest direction feedback was to avoid mimicking glass art too closely. In particular, everyone agreed that glass motifs that worked beautifully on the banners next to the central window didn’t make much sense as part of a table runner in the middle of the room. From this point in the project I dropped all attempts to incorporate the texture of bubbled or molded glass into the artwork, began to favor thick-and-thin linework between colors instead of single-width imitations of glass leading, and saved time to consider the table runner as a coordinating, rather than a matching, piece of art. The banner rendering began to lean much more closely to the art nouveau influences, while the table runner artwork pulled more deeply from arts and crafts textiles and even art deco product design.

Rendering

From this point we approached each season’s artwork separately, from start to finish. I took each piece of concept art back to the sketching phase, refining the curves of major outlines with pencil and paper. After transferring refined sketches to the computer, I carefully created a lattice of linework across both banners before beginning to color. This allowed me to check the harmony between the lines of the artwork and the lines of the sanctuary itself before committing to further rendering.

On a separate layer of the working file, I applied flat colors to each space in the lattice, using the largest spaces to achieve visual balance and flow, and filling the smaller areas with enough variety of shade and tone to mimic the sense of physicality presented by a real cut glass window. I could have stopped there and achieved the goal, but too often flat colors and outlines stand out in our visual perception, marking something unfinished or poorly integrated. To polish the presentation and achieve a better blend between the artwork and its surroundings, I added a series of transparent layers set to multiply, burn, and dodge, and used them to create subtle shading effects around the outline lattice and a gentle interior glow within each separate area of color.

The velvet pile of the table runners did not permit this kind of detail rendering, but the texture of the fabric was so compelling that it wasn’t necessary. In developing table runners, I focused on subtle shapes and fine lines, imagining embroidery and corded edging but not actually attempting to fake it in. Each table runner eventually had a different piece of artwork at each end. Turning it 180 degrees on the top of the altar would change the color and balance just enough to refresh the decoration, while continuing to function as a matched set. For most of the seasons, I tried to provide a noticeably more intricate option along with a more subdued option.

Again, and Again, and Again

The productive middle of the project consisted of following the same basic creative process four different times.

The major challenge for the season of Ordinary Time turned out to be color theory. Green has symbolized the life and growth of the church since the liturgical calendar was first practiced, but that doesn’t make it any better when paired with turkey red upholstery. The trick here is that very little of the finished Ordinary Time artwork is actually green. I achieved a green overall color by balancing yellows with a strong olive tint against blues with a strong teal or turquoise tint. In color theory, this is known as a triad or split complimentary color palette: instead of pairing the primary hue with the hue directly across the color wheel, which would be the hue of maximum dissonance or the “compliment”, this technique replaces the dissonant color with its closest relative on either side. The result is usually described as being emotionally energetic or upbeat, but unlike a true complimentary color palette it’s usually not described as “clashing” or “vibrating”. I needed to hide the magic a little more deeply for this project, because I was supposed to be creating a genuinely green piece of art. The final layer of magic is in the color value: I built the composition around contrasting light and dark spaces, meaning that the viewer’s brain has a strong cue to interpret the color as a result of direct sunlight. Subconsciously, then, yellow areas read as green objects in direct light, whereas blue areas read as green objects in shadow.

Lent is the most unsettled of the church’s celebrations, and I hoped to reflect that in the thunderstorm-inspired artwork I created. Central to the unsettled effect is a geometric pattern made of crossing layers of parallel lines. The width and spacing of the lines are logarithmic, to help convey depth and physical space and emphasize the endlessness of the rain. The angles at which they cross are based on the golden ratio, which is the reasoning behind A-series paper sizes and also the key ingredient in a lot of the best visual illusions.

Advent’s main problem was production-related, and had to do with the total amount of saturated blue dye being laid down at once. For the full details on color correction and preparing for successful print output, you can skip down to the section on prepress design. I’ll just add here that we never fully solved the smearing, dripping, and skipped lines of print. I had created artwork that was maddeningly just outside the capacity of the production method. Rather than re-work the art at the last moment, I chose to incorporate the errors into the texture details of drawing. This set of banners has a noticeable grain effect in the highlights and shadows that’s missing on the others, and it has a much more noticeable “glow” at the center of its widest elements. The first is to mask the tiny drips and splatters of navy ink in the light areas, and the second is to vary the total amount of saturation within each line of print and allow the fabric’s absorption to “catch up” to the printer’s output.

The Final Flourish

Christmas and Easter are the two most reverent and the two most joyful celebrations in the Christian’s year, so their traditional colors are white and gold. In the context of the liturgical calendar, neither one is a stand-alone feast day, either: Christmas Day is the first of twelve feast days collectively called Christmastide, while Easter Sunday is the beginning of one hundred whole days of Eastertide. All of this brought up two last challenges for our sanctuary installation project: how do we continue an illustrated series in a way that results in white banners, and what shall we do to make this set extra, super-duper special? To answer the first challenge, I returned to the trick I used for Ordinary Time and created a composition that relied heavily on bright, direct sunlight. In this way, a pattern of yellow and purple shapes could create the illusion of a white object in various depths of cast shadow.

The answer to the second was more complicated, and squeezed its way into the project scope in much the same way as the table runners. None of us really had the time or the budget for it, but we’re all old friends and it was genuinely too cool an idea to miss: this set of banners would have a perfectly-aligned transparent overlay that added tracings of metallic gold to the overall design. The burden of hand-cutting and tailoring the extra pieces intimidated me a bit, but this was my idea at the start so off I went to order swatches of metallic tulle and chiffon. This extra bonus flourish added some interesting requirements for the composition of the illustrated banners, as well. I couldn’t trace each line in gold, due to the limitations of both fabric and heat cutter. That meant that I would need to be able to group smaller areas in the illustration into larger gold shapes for the overlays, and still make the composition balance. Further, there were now limits to how abruptly the edge of those shapes could curve and how deep corners could be. The overall layout of the gold areas needed to play some part in supporting the weight of the gold fabric. Finally, I insisted that no trace of these design limitations be visible if the banners were displayed without the overlays–the magic trick only truly works if you can do it in reverse.

There’s no real lore, trick, or theory for balancing a list of requirements like that. For this, I simply sketched as many times as it took, inching it closer every time. Making art is always magic, but it’s the kind of magic where you put in as much effort, experience, and inspiration as it takes to finally coalesce into something beyond the parts. Now that the congregation has seen every set of art more than once, this is still the set that carries the most anticipation. Brides request these as a backdrop for their weddings, and the pastor laments every time they’re taken down. Most importantly, this was the culmination of a series of drawings that involved a lot of trust and a lot of cooperation, and collectively we excelled.

Prepress and Print Production

Any time a project transitions from screen to production, color proofing is absolutely essential. (This is true when the same artwork moves from one material to another, too!)

In 2023, Spoonflower was the only print producer in the US with the capacity to create the output quality we needed on the scale of this project. Fortunately, they offer a variety of products and achieve remarkable consistency in their color output. They also allow orders in unthinkably small quantities, so proofing is highly affordable. We ordered several rounds of tests before moving ahead with full-scale production.

Choosing Stock

We began by narrowing down which of Spoonflower’s catalogue of textile stock could offer the combination of visual and tactile aesthetics we wanted and also provide the physical durability the installation would require. In particular, we needed to find a fabric that was lightweight, UV resistant, didn’t stretch, and provided a pleasing translucence without becoming transparent. For this test, we ordered large samples–at least a yard long–using actual draft artwork from the project to compare the appearance and handling quality of the material. Based on the opacity, stability, and color reproduction of the printed fabric, the polyester satin was an easy winner.

The perfect fabric for the table runners would be heavy, wrinkle-resistant, hard to stain and easy to spot clean, and pleasant to touch. Since this element of the set would be viewed at a closer distance, it also needed to reproduce crisp line work with high accuracy. Finally, we needed it to reproduce color with a similar saturation and luminance to the satin we had chosen for the banners. Eight-inch square swatches would have been enough for this test, but we narrowed our choices down to four fabrics with similar fiber content to the satin, and ordered a quarter yard of each. These samples were large enough to analyze print quality and compare the reproduction of specific colors between fabrics. Of course, we also tested each one on the all-important journey through the washing machine! We selected a polyester velvet for three of the four sets, because the sheen and color reproduction matched the satin banners perfectly. The opulence of the plush fabric seemed conceptually dissonant in the set designed for Lent, so we also chose a plainweave canvas made from recycled bottles to help represent the more restrained aesthetic of the Lent season.

Color Calibration, Completely By Hand

From this point, the colors had to be calibrated for the printing process. Most designers are familiar with color rendering profiles, which try to match the on-screen appearance of colors in an image file to the color that’s supposed to appear on paper when a certain set of process, ink, and paper are used according to the manufacturer’s standards. Those don’t exist for less common printing methods, so I used manual calibration for all the colors in this project.

Sometimes, a swatch will display an overall skew in tint or temperature, which can be adjusted quickly by adding one or more correction layers to the source image. For this print process, different color ranges needed different adjustments to match the color I had in mind, so I broke it down color-by-color for maximum control. The bottom layer of each illustration file still consisted of a flat tone for each shape, so I had quick access to the colors by hiding all the upper layers. From there, I could select all areas of the same color tone and apply the same adjustment to them all at once.

Looking at the color printed on the swatch for Advent, for example, I discovered that the orange tones all tended yellow, with the pinkest ones also lacking color depth. Taking careful note of the original HSB and CMYK values for the displayed color, I could find out exactly how great an adjustment to the color values in the file was required to match the on-screen color to the printed color.

Remember that that’s not the color I was after, though–the point of calibration is to match the printed color to the color I chose when I was working digitally! To get that color, I carefully reset the sliders to their original color, and then made the same size adjustment in the opposite direction. For example, if reducing the magenta value by 20% and the cyan value by 5% made the screen match the proof, then increasing the magenta by 20% and the cyan by 5% should be the right correction to make the next proof match the screen. This kind of hand adjustment can make your artwork look pretty wild, and it’s easy to get disoriented. Always remember to keep a safety copy of your original artwork so you don’t lose track and waste time!

Production Files

Of course, after an adjustment that detailed, the artwork needs to be proofed a second time to make sure the corrections were on track. This second set of proofs were also a helpful comparison for me, as they allowed me to notice and troubleshoot places in the art that sometimes oversaturated or smeared due to the limitations of printing on fabric. Once I was satisfied with the output color and quality, it was time to send in the order!

The maximum resolution for Spoonflower’s printing method is 150 dpi, and since they’re a direct-to-consumer manufacturer, they require you to submit your artwork through an online upload portal that caps the file size at 500 mb. In addition, you buy Spoonflower fabrics in whole yard increments. To create the final production files, I resampled a copy of the artwork to 150 px/in, extended the margin of the image to 108 x 54 in., and played with the quality slider until I had the highest-quality jpeg possible within the 500 mb. limit. Because heat cutting takes up a little bit of the margin, and my own heat cutter is a little hard to use precisely, I added an extra inch of the border color around the cut edges. Finally, I extended the top margin to make sure the reverse side of the rod pocket would match the top of the banner.

Finally, time to upload and wait!

Physical Production and Installation

Each piece of printed artwork arrived at my studio as folded textile yardage. For each of the four installments of the cycle, I received two lengths of polyester satin and one piece of heavyweight upholstery velvet, each of which measured about three yards long by fifty-four inches wide.

Cutting

I cut the yardage to the final size and shape using an electric heat cutter to maximize the longevity of the final piece. While the banners are on display, the main threats to their durability will be deterioration from UV light, and the fabric’s own weight. For both of these challenges, avoiding a traditional sewn hem at the vertical edges was a major advantage: as the banners slowly settle during years of vertical display, the fabric and hemming thread would have loosened and stretched at slightly different rates due to their different construction. The disparity would have created a puckered edge and saggy center, possibly requiring routine pressing and re-sewing that would have added further stress to the material. By creating a flexible sealed edge from the fabric itself, we did our best to ensure that the banners would display and store elegantly for years with minimal retouching.

The reasoning was slightly different in the case of the velvet table runners. The upholstery velvet was simply too thick for a traditional hem! It was technically possible to fold the fabric over and stitch it to itself, but the added bulk at the edges was distracting and unsightly wherever the table runner curved over the edges of the altar. Further testing demonstrated that the heat-sealed edge of the upholstery fabric could still be machine washed in case of spills, with no harm done to the color or structure of the cloth. Getting a smooth edge on the plush fabric was a matter of transferring the cut lines to the back side of the cloth, taping the pile down with low-tack drafting tape, and removing the tape after the shape had been cut through the reverse of the material. With that accomplished, the table runners were done!

Assembly

The only task left was to sew a rod pocket for the top of each banner. For this step, traditional hand-tailoring techniques worked beautifully to preserve the fabric’s ability to stretch and settle while remaining flat. I had already taken the time to ensure the grain of the fabric was perfectly vertical before cutting each piece, but I put in the additional effort here to ensure that the top of the pocket was exactly square. I chose a stiff cotton traditionally used in high-end suits to stabilize the slinky satin, using flexible stitching to fasten everything securely but not rigidly.

The same tailoring approach served well for the metallic overlays we created for the Easter/Christmas banner set. By prioritizing precise vertical grain direction and fluid seam tension, it was possible to create intricate, curved piecing between two very different fabrics while ensuring that the finished object hung flat and straight.

Next Steps

As I write this post, the congregation of Living Water have begun their second cycle through the colors and imagery we worked so hard to create together. Their pastor, building trustees, and visual design trustees have also begun considering the next steps in their overall vision for the sanctuary interior.

While the historic church calendar actually contains several colors and symbols we haven’t explored yet, it doesn’t suit Living Water’s needs to add to the banner collection yet.

Instead, the building trustees have identified the large, Northeast-facing windows of the nave and chancel as the next highest priority. The windows are double panes and very durable, but not polarized. For the majority of the year, morning sunlight creates intense backlighting during morning worship services, so the goal for the next phase of the interior decoration is to create a solution to the glare while retaining the natural light and further enhancing the design of the space.

At the moment, the plan is for me to research physical material and production options geared toward customizable shade and decoration, and present the most suitable possibilities at the end of the year. If we discover a solution that meets the goals and budget, I’ll begin design work on the project in the spring of 2026.

Until then! ––EMJ