Otts Creative Ministries

       It’s always fun to show the process of a painting, especially since it’s a bit difficult to have a full painting to post for the Instagram algorithm every time. I started this painting before school ended but haven’t been able to truly work on it until coming home for the summer. I would tell you more about the painting itself, but that’s a post for another day. Instead, I want to focus on the process.               Oil painting is very much a “trust the process” sort of thing. Any art is really. You do something, unsure of how it will turn out. You may look at your work and think, what do I do now? You may think you know what you’re doing, but then something unexpected happens, like a splotch of paint you accidentally throw on it, or maybe someone else does something to it. The art process is never one that you can fully know. Yet, if you continue working at it, trusting what you know and lea...

Being a woman today is hard, especially as a Christian woman. The world tells us so many contradicting things. “Cover up those spots on your face.” “You’re wearing too much makeup.” “Lose that belly fat.”   “You’re too skinny, eat a burger.” “Work hard and be a girl boss.” “Don’t put work above your family.” “Ugh, do you ever talk about more than just your kids?” “Be an independent woman!” “Why are you still single?” “Be this” “Be that” “Be perfect” The standards that society places on women are so incredibly fickle and constantly changing. Your looks could be trendy one day and cringey the next. The monologue from Barbie was right, being a woman means having all these expectations on you, expectations that you will never actually be able to meet. And the world knows you’ll never meet them. So often they use these standards to make you feel insecure and to make you buy things to solve those insecurities. They tell you to lose weight, show off some more...

    Hi, hello welcome, hola! Welcome to my blog and page, Otts Creative Ministries. I started posting my art over a year ago, but I wasn’t entirely sure what direction to go with my art, (or my life in general due to a breakup lol). However, over the past few months, God’s been watering a seed that was planted a while ago in a class I took before I switched my major from worship leadership to studio art. The class was Survey of the Arts in Worship, which was a class about using different forms of art in worship such as lighting, video, graphics, and visual art, not just music. Reading those books in that class, I wasn’t thinking as a worship leader, thinking “Oh, I should use these forms of art in worship at whatever church I end up at.” No, I was thinking as an artist, thinking, “This book is defending my work as a Christian artist, that it is needed just as any other talent God gives people .”   To my teacher of that class, Collin Clardy, thanks for having us read t...