When you get to your mid forties, you’re still young enough to say buzz words like “immersive art”, but you also get to start using big important sounding words like “case study”. It basically means here’s a project I worked on recently, and the steps it took to get to the final product. But you don’t get to use the word case study until you’re at least over 40 years old, okay?

Promise?

Good. I’m gonna be checking on you to make sure you’re holding up your end of this deal, and if I find any of you under forties saying “case study” you owe me twenty bucks.

This spring, I had the completely awesome opportunity to create a custom immersive art scene for Momentum Christian Church in McDonough, Georgia. It didn’t start out that way at all. My friend Meredith from Dwellings Interior Design got in touch with me saying she was looking for a little help with some custom pieces for Momentum’s IF Gathering. I always jump at the chance to work with Momentum; they give me lots of creative freedom on my projects and our collaborations are always full of insightful edits and tweaks, while still supporting my art direction. I got to work with Jodi this time, and we had a blast!

This project wasn’t immediately an immersive art scene – it evolved into that as we started figuring out all the art needs. I started with watching a good chunk of this year’s IF Gathering online broadcast to get a feel for the theme and see if any bits stood out. I’m so glad I did, because the sessions all turned out to be a deep dive into Psalm 23. Knowing this, and watching the first session where the girl is holding the sheep that keeps interrupting her conversation with super cute lamb noises, I knew I wanted that sheep to be front and center on the custom tee shirt graphic.

I start all my projects, big and small, with inspiration and sketches. Sometimes, it’s a lot of tiny thumbnails in my sketchbook. Other times, it’s playing around with drawing in Procreate on my iPad or doodling with random shapes and typefaces in Illustrator on my desktop PC. So as I started working on the tee shirt graphic, and working with some mountain scene inspiration Meredith had pulled for the backdrop of the stage… Ideas started pulling together.

We’re all God’s sheep… what if we’re wearing the shirts, and the backdrop is the mountains and valleys he leads us through… but then the tables in the room continue the pasture feel? And then the journals we want to create, those could be bright pops of flowers in the pasture?

This is what my brain was picturing at this point. Thankfully, this awesome image in my head that refused to go away was approved by Meredith and Jodi, because if they weren’t into it I guarantee this idea would still be nibbling away at the back of my mind months later.

The challenge? To create the artwork in a way that was pulling together Meredith’s visual inspiration, my own art style, and the overall branding that the IF Gathering folks came up with for 2023. I was digging IF’s color palette for sure! Y’all know how I am with funky bright colors.

The tee shirt design came first – I wanted to create something feminine, but not to pastel that it wouldn’t be worn repeatedly by lots of women with lots of different design tastes. That’s a sign of a great tee shirt design – something that you’ll see reworn over and over after the event. Knowing what works in that realm isn’t always easy to do – that part comes a little easier for me because I’ve got a background with years of tee shirt design for big stores like JC Penney, Target, and Hot Topic.

This is the backdrop I digitally painted in Photoshop to hang on the stage. It’s a huge scale file – while I mostly work on iPad these days to avoid being chained to a desk, this baby required the beefy PC power on the computer in my art studio. We got this printed on a banner that was 4’ tall by 12’ wide!

And then this was the journal cover I created for a special note-taking giveaway during our IF Gathering weekend. Digital painting in Procreate on iPad plus tons of hand lettering (and planning to make sure the entire verse fit inside the 23, and make sure it was all legible when it printed out!). These are fun little purse journals that I assemble by hand in my art studio.

At the end, we decided to repurpose the idea of the text inside the 23 from the journal cover to print water bottle stickers to give out as well. This lettering isn’t hand lettered – for a 4” sticker, I just can’t write that tiny and legibly, so I looked for a cute font style that fit with the rest of the group.

And here’s how my immersive art scene came together! Look at how much fun they’re having! I love how Meredith styled the tables with grass rugs – it gave a really nice hit of texture to the overall look of things. Also, side note, this year’s IF Gathering was a great one. When you dig that deep into everything held in Psalm 23, it’s fairly mind blowing. It’s become one of those verses I hold near to my heart that leans towards anxiety, and it really helps me to remember to stop and relax every now and then.

Please contact me at StephCalvertArt@gmail.com if interested in licensing any of these art pieces for your upcoming events or product designs. I would also like to work with you on fresh custom art, freelance illustration, logo design, and mural projects! You can fill out an online form about your project here.