Sandi Hester

I want to thank all of you who sent e-mails and left comments on my blog about losing our dog. You were all so thoughtful and left such sweet words of sympathy and comfort. Thank you for thinking of us!

On to a happier note… Grady and I celebrated our 12 year wedding anniversary this past weekend – yahoo!!! I’m amazed at the blessing the Lord has bestowed on our marriage – it seems to get better and better each year. Of course it gets that way with work – Grady and I both work very hard on our marriage. The Lord has been gracious to teach both of us with each passing year how to be a better wife and husband. The secret is in following His Word – He’s laid it all out in the Bible on how to be a godly wife and husband and it can only be done in the power and grace of Jesus Christ.

Over the weekend I went to a wedding shower of a dear friend who is a godly young woman. I wanted to give her something special – I worked for days on this painting and was pleased with how it turned out. I did something new with this painting – something I’ve wanted to try for a while. Watercolor usually has to be framed because it has to be protected, but I did this one on paper and then mounted it on canvas. You can’t use watery based mediums to seal a watercolor painting but I found that you can use wax – wax like you use to seal furniture. I’m not sure how it will stand the test of time – it could look really bad in 30, 50, or a 100 years but you never know until you try . The wax turned the white paper a little yellow but I like that aged look. I’ve also wanted to try adding some sewing to my paintings. I sewed on the painting itself and I also sewed all the hand-aged/hand-torn papers together. I wanted the strings to hang and show – I liked that look with the bird – kind of reminds me of a bird’s nest. I’ll be posting more birds soon – you’ll get to see what this little birdie was inspired from.

The scripture I used for this painting is Matthew 6:25-34 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear… Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” The title of the painting is “Do Not Worry”. I wanted to keep that cute little thing, but he had another home. More birdies to come soon. You can click on the pictures to see more details.

Being Good Friday I thought I’d leave you with something I pray you’ll linger on throughout the day – it’s worth lingering on I promise – http://desiringgod.org/Blog/2313_barrabas_and_me/.

I finally got the courage up to give commission work a try. I picked a limited subject (houses) that I thought I had a relative grasp on and threw it out there to friends and family. I had 5 takers! That was just the right number to try and get done before the holidays. They took me MUCH longer than I thought they would. I painted from 3-5 different paintings of the same house for each commission – it took me that many times to get it right. Each painting took 3-5 days to paint, so if you add that up you can quickly see why it took me longer than I thought it would. During the time I was working on these commissions I did little else – my days were filled with painting – which was great and fun but something I would not want to do all the time. If I wasn’t painting I was thinking about how to resolve something in the painting I was having problems with. Each painting was mated and had a scripture on the mat that went with the painting. For the homes I used Joshua 24:15 “As for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” and for the cabins and vacation homes I used two different scriptures: Mark 6:31 “Come with Me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” and Matthew 11:28 “Come to Me, all you who are weary and I will give you rest.” In the end I was really happy with all of them and my customers seemed to be really happy with them too!

The first commission I got was from my friend Tasha. I painted the house they live in now some time ago and she wanted me to paint their first house for her. She said she’ll be having me paint every house they live in . She talked to her husband about it and he told her that’s what he was going to do to surprise her for Christmas! After she told me that my mind got to thinking – we could still pull that off as a surprise for her. She e-mailed me a day or so later and told me if I was getting lots of Christmas requests not to worry about getting to her’s until I was done with Christmas gifts – that gave me the time I needed to work with her husband in surprising her. Joe (her husband) and I worked it out and she had no idea! Fun stuff!!

The second commission was Sheila’s family cabin. I did this one 50 million times – ok well maybe not that many but it felt like it . She ended up choosing 2 of them ! They were both very different and captured different things about the cabin and land.

Each commission was so different. Jana was my third commission and she wanted me to paint her son’s cabin. It was challenging but fun because it had all kinds of different wood and stone on it – all kinds of textures and colors. My favorite part of this painting are the shingles.

The fourth commission was from a student I had in my last watercolor class. Her in-laws are building their dream home and she wanted me to paint it for them. It’s a beautiful craftsman style home and called for a tighter painting. I feel like as you look at each of these paintings it looks like a different artist painted some of them – but I promise I did all of them myself!

The last painting I did was for a dear friend. She’s one of my all time favorite people to be with – she is hilarious, loves the Lord, and is one of the kindest people I know. Her dad is my allergist doctor. He is the BEST! Seriously, he treats me like one of his own daughters. She and her other siblings went in together and commissioned me to paint their family cabin on the lake. For some reason this was my favorite one. I think because I just let loose. It was taking me several tries for each painting so I just thought the first go around on Mary Julia’s painting I would just have fun – and what do you know it turned out the first try! I love the looseness of the painting. She insisted I put the flags in the painting because she said it was a family thing and they gave a splash of color that goes well with the green roof.

I hope each of the families were joyfully surprised with their paintings at Christmas. Each person that picked their painting up was really excited about giving it to their family for Christmas. It was a great experience and I hope all the families find it to be a gift they will treasure for years to come! Below are some of the pictures I painted from – I didn’t have a digital picture of all of them because some people gave me hard copies. You can click on any of the pictures to see them larger.

One of the things we love most about our church is the worship.  David Moffitt has been our worship pastor for the last 10 years.  He and his wife, Susan, are precious to us.  They have blessed us tremendously with their worship and their lives.  To honor and bless them at their 10 year anniversary our church contacted me about doing a piece of art for them as a gift.  YIKES!!!  PRESSURE!!!!  That’s what would normally be going through my head… but before the church contacted me the Lord had already laid something on my heart to do for them as a gift of appreciation to them – so I already knew exactly (well sort of – at least had a concept in my head) what I was going to do for them.  I knew I wanted to do something with an old hymn from some of the old hymn books I’ve collected at antique stores.  This one was from a hymn book from 1908.  A friend of theirs gave me some suggestions of some hymns that would be special to them and I decided on “All Hail the Power of Jesus Name”.  It was a hymn they had in their wedding and I think it speaks of their heart to call all to look to Jesus because He is Lord of all.

Susan was at my house a while back and fell in love with some old frames I had, so I used one of those to frame their art in.  I knew if nothing else they would like the frame .  I wanted to do something that highlighted the hymn and something that was simple and beautiful.  I had the idea of doing a layered thing – I wanted the hymn to “float” and be the highlight, but I wanted the background to be simple but pretty at the same time.  It took me a while to get it the way I liked it, but I picked some pages from the bible (from the Psalms of course since David is a worship pastor) and I did some layering.  I wanted to soften the background and came up with using… are you ready for this… dryer sheets to layer on top of the bible pages.  I dyed the drier sheets in tea to color them and they worked perfectly – it gave the piece the soft look I was going for and some texture.  As much as I wanted the hymn to be the focus, I wanted the focus of the hymn (Jesus) to be the main focus.  So I painted that as the highlight of the piece.

I pray it will be a blessing to them, because they have blessed us and our church tremendously over the last 10+ years.  We love you guys!!!!!!!  As always, you can click on the picture to see it close-up.

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet!  Be still!”  Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.  Mark 4:39

I painted this for my Dad for his birthday.  There have been some stresses with work this year for my Dad, and I wanted to remind him that during the “storms” of life the wind and the waves still know His voice.  Happy Birthday Daddy – I love you!!!