I recently created a set of sermon slides based on "The Body of Christ" for the folks at Sharefaith.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I recently created a set of Easter slides for the folks at Sharefaith.

The client wanted something bright and happy so I went to my source of bright happy things—my paintings. You may not recognize it, but that color burst is the end result of manipulating one of my paintings in Photoshop.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

Check out the letters up through M below, then follow him on Instagram to see the rest of the series unfold. You can also check out more of Max's work on his website.

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I recently created a set of slides based on the concept of creation for the folks at Sharefaith.

The client wanted to incorporate earth imagery and I went with that to create a dynamic and vibrant piece. I wanted to communicate a lot of energy and movement with this design.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I recently created a series of Easter sermon artwork for the folks at Sharefaith.

Easter (especially Good Friday) is one of my favorite concepts to explore with my art and design. There is such extreme beauty and ugliness wrapped up in this event. It has many theological complexities to explore, yet it also contains many profound simple truths. It is horrifically violent, yet through it Jesus gives us a crystal clear example of non-violence and loving your enemies. This stuff blows my mind and I'll never get tired of it.

For these, the client wanted three unified designs—Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter—that could be used all through Holy Week. It was a fun challenge to figure out how to give all the pieces a unified, yet unique look, as well as trying to capture the beauty/ugliness contrast. I'm very proud of how these turned out.

The full set is available on Sharefaith.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner).

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I recently created a set of slides based on the concept of "The Lies We Believe" for the folks at Sharefaith.

The topic of lies/evil versus truth/good is one of my favorite things to illustrate. You've got good, evil and the struggle between them. I knew from the start that I wanted to use a black, white and red color palette—bold, contrasting colors that communicate that struggle. I also knew it should have a really gritty vibe to help communicate the messiness of that struggle.

The full set is available on Sharefaith.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I recently created sermon art based on the concept of "Standing in the Storms" for the folks at Sharefaith.

There is already a lot of sermon art based on storm visuals and I wanted this one to feel new and unique. Most art I've seen based on this concept focuses exclusively on the negative—the oppressive storm. I wanted to also allude to the positive—the idea that we have access to a power that helps us weather, and even overcome, the storms. In order to make this unique and to bring in some of that positive and exciting energy, I decided to give it a strong 1980s vibe. Bright colors, smoke, lightning, etc. It was a ridiculous amount of fun.

The full set is available on Sharefaith.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I recently created a set of slides based on the concept of "Love and War" for the folks at Sharefaith.

I wanted to represent the strong contrast of Love/War. In any relationship, there are highs and lows. Times when you are in a groove and times where you hit a lot of bumps. I decided to capture that contrast of good and bad times and decided on a split image of a rose.

Close ups as well as several other slides in the set can be seen below. The full set is available on Sharefaith.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I recently created a set of slides based on Black History Month for the folks at Sharefaith.

I've been very interested interested in African-American history for a while, so I was thrilled to be able to work on this set. The most difficult thing for this project was narrowing in on the few people to include. I knew I wanted to represent a spectrum eras, gender and areas of influence. I ended up with the following:

• Frederick Douglass – A social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement and wrote several books including his highly influential autobiography, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave."
• Jackie Robinson – The first African-American major league baseball player in the modern era. He had an impact on the culture of and contributed significantly to the Civil Rights Movement.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. – Minister, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.
• Ella Fitzgerald – A highly influential jazz singer known for noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing and intonation, and a "horn-like" improvisational ability.
• George Washington Carver – Born into slavery in the 1860s, Carver became a well known botanist and inventor. Through his botany work he wanted to help poor farmers grow alternative crops both as a source of their own food and as a source of other products to improve their quality of life.
• Rosa Parks – In 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger. This simple act of resistance became one of the most important symbols of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The thing I especially love about Rosa Parks is that she was known to be "timid and shy" but had "the courage of a lion."
• Ida B. Wells –  A journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, Georgist, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement.

Close ups as well as several other slides in the set can be seen below. The full set is available on Sharefaith.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

Secondary slides

If you follow me on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, you may have seen this series of "Blessed to Death" pieces I did over the last month. I captioned every single piece "#blessed" and here's why.

It's interesting that if you look at the Beatitudes—Jesus' definitive teaching on who is blessed—he never mentions people who are happy, have a high status or a vast amount of wealth. He doesn't mention those who are privileged by birth or have just plain good luck. In fact, he basically mentions the opposite of what our current culture would describe as blessed. Rather, Jesus says it's the downtrodden, those who are in mourning, those who are meek, merciful and bring peace to troubled situations. It's those who are persecuted by others. 

Yet in our current American religious culture, we've bastardized the word. I almost always hear it in regards to having privilege, status, wealth and possessions. Being "blessed" with a promotion a high salary, a second home, a luxury car, etc. Kinda sucks for people who don't have a high status or wealth or a great job (or any job at all), right? In fact, this wealth definition of "blessed" indicts everyone who may not have those things. 

So who is blessed? Again, I look to Jesus. He said its downtrodden and those who are in mourning. It's those who are meek, merciful and bring peace to troubled situations. It's those who are persecuted by others. 

You might even say that "blessed" looks like being tortured, ridiculed and crucified while loving those who are doing those things to you. When those with power, wealth and privilege crucified a meek, poor Jewish Rabbi, it was actually Jesus who was bursting at the seams with blessing, bringing life into a dark world. 

It's time to crucify the self-centered, materialistic, wealth-based idea of "blessed." Who's with me?

All 4 pieces in this series are available to purchase on my print shop.

I recently created a sermon series set based on Hanukkah for the folks at Sharefaith.

I ended up going with very traditional symbols (the Star of David and a Menorah) but gave them and the entire piece a very modern and clean look.

The full sermon set is available on Sharefaith.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity. 

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I recently created a sermon series set based on the Ten Commandments for the folks at Sharefaith.

The story of the Ten Commandments is pretty strange. A single person goes to the top of a mountain and God gives him a list of rules for him and his tribe chiseled on stone tablets. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to visually explore that strangeness and ended up using an abstract collage style to hint at how unusual and layered with meaning this event was.

I really like how this design built out into other slides and have included a couple examples below. The full sermon set is available on Sharefaith.

Big thanks to Josh Warren, Jon Deviny and Juliet Towner (the Art Director at Sharefaith) for their thoughts and feedback while I created this set.

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I worked at Faithlife for 3 years, leaving in May 2015 to pursue full time freelance work. During my time at the company, one of my main responsibilities was to lead and grow the Verse of the Day project. By the time I left, the project had over 1000 pieces of original verse art and had gained a lot of popularity among customers. The team of designers working on it were producing some incredible art—far above and beyond what you'd find at a Christian book store. It's my proudest achievement during my time there.

Once I started freelancing, I had the opportunity to continue working on Verse of the Day by doing the layout design and typesetting for "Picturing Scripture," a coffee table style book with 100 pieces of Verse of the Day art—created by myself and other designers at Faithlife—paired with original writings based on the art. The book just launched as a Kickstarter project. Check it out and pre-order a copy or two. (You can even get a glimpse of me in my office/house in the Kickstarter video made by the very talented Joshua Thomas Gray.)

I have 34 pieces of verse art and several writings in the book. Below are a few examples of my verse art.

View more of my verse art or purchase digital files of my biblical art on Biblestock.

I was asked by the folks at Sharefaith to create some Christmas sermon art based on John 3:16 and the theme of "Unexpected Love."

I wanted to show how incredibly unique Jesus' entrance into humanity was. This was not just another baby. Not just another birth. This was the son of God entering the earth in human form and that's super crazy. I knew I wanted to represent Jesus' nature in a brilliant, colorful way and contrast that against the darkness of the world he entered. I decided to use an abstract painting of mine for that brilliant, colorful representation. (You can see the original painting I used below.)

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity.

The full sermon set is available on Sharefaith.

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I was asked by the folks at Sharefaith to create some sermon art for "Consumed" based on Luke 12:15 where Jesus warns agains greed and selfishness.

I started—and scrapped—several different concepts for this series. They each ended up feeling so visually and conceptually cluttered that the imagery ended up feeling confusing. Eventually, I noticed the "ME" in the word "CONSUMED," and I knew I had something. 

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity.

The full sermon set is available to purchase on Sharefaith.

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I was asked by the folks at Sharefaith to create some sermon art for "Salt & Light" based on Matthew 5:13–16 where Jesus speaks about how his followers should stand out in the world.

In doing research, I found that most imagery centered around this verse and theme had a very serious feel and was photo realistic, using imagery of actual salt or light flares. I wanted to explore different ways to visually express the theme so I went with a more playful and illustrated vibe.

Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity.

The full sermon set is available to purchase on Sharefaith.

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

I was asked by the folks at Sharefaith to create some sermon art for "Sticks and Stones" based on Matthew 12:37 where Jesus speaks about the power of words.

After coming up with a several concepts, I landed on one that visually combined the idea of sticks and stones as words within a quote bubble. Even though I typically do computer or hand drawn illustration work, I really felt like this concept could work well using found objects and custom photography. I happen to live right on a body of water, so I went outside and combed the beach for driftwood and stones. After finding a good selection, I started assembling the stick/stone quote bubble. Getting everything to fit just right involved a lot of trial and error and ended up taking longer than I'd anticipated, but I'm very happy with how it turned out.

After assembling, I took photos of the piece and brought it into Photoshop to cut it out, process it and build it into the sermon set.

This was a really fun project to work on, especially being able to incorporate some physical objects from right outside my house. Big thanks to the folks at Sharefaith (especially the Art Director, Juliet Towner) for the opportunity.

The full sermon set is available to purchase on Sharefaith.

View more of my sermon art and drop me a message if you're interested in custom sermon imagery. You may also purchase digital files of some of my biblical art in my shop.

Last year I had the pleasure of working with Union Gospel Mission (UGM) in St. Paul, MN. Since 1902, UGM has offered help for the homeless, poor and addicted in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area through meals, shelter, recovery, education and job training programs. In other words, they do really awesome stuff.

Since their early days, "God is love" has been a highly influential and guiding verse for UGM. I was asked to do a modern take on the verse that also referenced their past. I was provided with some great historic photos of different UGM buildings and events over the past 115 years and paired those with a modern custom type treatment of "God is love." The final mural was printed at 8x8' and placed in their chapel (photos below). The room is not only used for chapel service 365 days a year but is also an emergency shelter and serves as a bedroom for 52 guys every night of the year.

It's hard to put into words how fun and rewarding it is to do this type of work with an organization whose mission is to serve the homeless, poor and addicted. Absolutely incredible. Big thanks to David Morrow at UGM for reaching out to me and trusting me with this project.

* This project renewed my interest in the verse "God is love" and I ended up creating several other custom type versions of the verse.

Final mural in the chapel

Four historic UGM images used in the final mural