Married Monday: Team Work

Last Sunday, the First Lady of my church and her son stopped me at the end of service.  I had to usher, so I was one of the last people to leave after service.  The church is currently having a building fund to repair parts of the church and they wanted to church members to know how much they raised.  That's when they asked me to step in.  In December and January, I won a church logo and coloring contest.  That's when they found out that I was an Architectural Designer and loved to draw.

When they first contacted me, I thought they were going to ask me to help them redesign the bathroom.  Instead, I was assigned the task of creating the building fund board.  I was excited at first because I already drew an elevation of the church for the logo contest, so I was going to draw everything in Photoshop.  But my excitement went away when I found out they wanted it on a dry erase board.  I gladly agreed and I got my 17 year old cousin to help me transport the boards.

While I waited for the boards, I sketched a couple of ideas on paper and later put everything into Photoshop.  By 5pm, the boards were in my computer room.  The 4'x4' boards that were leaned up against my walls made me rethink whether I wanted to do it.  Yes everything looked good on paper and digitally, but I didn't know if I could reproduce it.  Even though I draw for a living, I haven't drawn at a large scale by hand since college.

I got Brian to help me with the design process so I wouldn't burn myself out.  Here is how it was went down:

Day 1: Sketch out the design.
Day 2: Sent the draft to the first lady.  Freak out that she doesn't check her email.

Sketched out.

I put everything in Photoshop.  Brian convinced me to mirror the church.

Day 3: Check email, with no response. Decide to draw the letters and erase it 10 times.
Day 4: Admitted that I was a perfectionist. Drew letters again and erase it. Decide to draw the rest of the design.

Original hand written letters.

Day 5: Used vinyl letters instead.
Day 6: Sent the design to First lady by text and she loved it. Redesigned and erased the shaded areas and filled in areas with lines with Brian's help.

Revised the letters and used vinyl letters.  The letter weren't as big as my original text so I had to redo my lines.

 Day 7: Finished!

Final product!  I decided to use a ruler to make the lines inside the building to be straighter.  I continued to use the line theme to fill in the meter and the title.  I moved the title "building fund."  Also, Brian double checked to make sure my meter was correct...and it wasn't lol.  My counting skills some how went out the window.

Added my flower to the design, lol.

On Sunday, before the sermon, they presented the board.  After travel and moving the board to the pulpit some of the text got smeared.  This was my face:

Source: Tumblr.com

That was the downside of using a dry erase board.  Overall, everyone loved it but I will be doing touch ups next Sunday.  If I did this without Brian's help, the idea wouldn't have came up this good.  Architecture school has gotten me use to receiving critiques before the final product is released, so I love getting Brian's input.  Gotta love married life!