I have been working on our Spiritual Awareness Community’s handout that is used for distributing current information. Such specific items as the background of the day’s speaker and printouts of the songs that will be sung that Sunday afternoon. It has been an interesting experiment in creative writing because the group is undergoing a radical transformation at the moment. I was designated as the person to design this document and given total liberty as what would be put into it. That was intended as a starting point for the people of our group to discuss and make improvements upon. I have been giving the group as near a finished product to work with as possible so it is more easy for them to see what the final product will look like. It has already gone through an hour of critique and improvements were put into the current document.
One thing that is more difficult to analyze and critique is the artwork that I have put on the front and back covers. I had previously made some high-quality photographs of the omega symbol that existed for a couple of decades in a stained glass window over the heads of our little community. It was behind us and I don’t remember anyone making a comment about it or the other symbols as they were not particularly relevant to what happened in our meetings. All the same, they were there looking down upon us for decades so I thought it was appropriate to put the Alpha and Omega on the cover of our brochure. We have moved into a new building and those stained-glass symbols are lost to us forever. The Alpha is the beginning and the Omega the ending of the Classic Greek alphabet and so, in a general symbolic sense, those letters represent the beginning and the ending of our use of that building. It was under those letters that my friend Ahonu and I did the Sermon on the Mount sermon on Christmas day. I thought that the most fitting ending service for a hundred-year-old church that may never host another religious service.
I have been working on the Alpha and Omega symbols for our group’s brochure for a couple of weeks, and the Omega symbol is spectacular because it was created from a close-up picture. Unfortunately, the Alpha symbol had been taken from a photo of the whole stained glass series and was only a few percent of the photograph. Thus the overall photograph was very clean and sharp, but the tiny portion of the Alpha wasn’t nearly as high a quality as the close-up of the Omega. What to do?
I took the blurry Alpha and expanded it to the same size as the very sharp Omega. I then recreated the Alpha by cloning over the appropriate surface details onto it from the Omega details. There was quite a bit of “artistic license” in doing this, but the end result is that the two letters can be viewed side by side and have the same visual feel. I consider it a success, but I will have to wait until the next meeting to get some feedback on how the other people feel.
It is a feeling thing more than an intellectual one that is important in some situations.