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Creative Ways to Use Your Alleluia Coloring Page

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Alleluia Butterfly Easter

If you haven’t purchased your Alleluia Butterfly Coloring Page & Poster yet, I wanted to share some fun ideas from our community.

The Alleluia Butterflies

Alleluia-Butterflies-Colored

I got the following note from Kristen Koch, pastor at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in St. Ann, Missouri (yes, we featured them last week here):

I wanted to show you the idea I came up with for the alleluia file from Illustrated Ministry. I printed the 8.5×11 file, landscape, on cardstock paper. Then I cut it out, colored it and taped a jumbo craft stick to the back. I’ll hand them out (colored and uncolored) at the children’s message. Then I’ll tell the kids that whenever they hear “alleluia” in the service they should wave their signs.

Like we said in last week’s post, Creativity Breeds Creativity, it’s so much fun to see the creative ways people are using our resources. We all become more enriched and creative when you share your ideas – and so we just want to thank everyone who keeps sharing photos and letting us learn from you.

Here are a few other fun uses of our Alleluia Butterfly and Alleluia Easter Lily illustrations.

If you haven’t gotten your Alleluia Butterfly Coloring Page & Poster yet, you can find it here.

We also have two other Alleluia designs you may be interested in for your Lenten/Easter plans:

Creativity Breeds Creativity: A Case Study on Coloring Posters

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One of the joys for me, over the past 6 months, has been to really invest in doing work that is creative. That isn’t to say that I didn’t do creative work while serving a parish full-time, but this just feels different. It’s exciting to have my primary work about creating something and sharing it.

But beyond that, it’s even more fun to see how people take the work that I’ve done, and go in different directions with it. This idea that creativity breeds or feeds creativity has been fun to watch play out in the real world, as I’ve been searching Instagram, Facebook and Twitter over the past few months to see what our customers have been sharing with hashtags like #anillustratedadvent and #anillustratedlent.

Last night I was browsing through the photos shared on Facebook, and I ran across the below photo from Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in St. Ann, Missouri.

Vine-Posters

Obviously, I was immediately drawn to their creative way of representing the thread that connects all of the posters together. I reached out to their pastor, Kristen Koch, and below is a brief Q&A that we had about how their church has been experimenting with the Lenten Coloring Posters over the past few weeks.

Illustrated Ministry (IM): What a joy to find your photo shared on Facebook last night. These banners are beautiful – can you tell me a little bit about them?

Kristen: We’ve totally enjoyed the Lenten banners! We have invited the kids at the beginning of worship to come to a low table at the front of the sanctuary to color while we do the “Gather” and “Word” portions of worship (they go back to their seats for the “meal” and “sending”). Whatever they have finished by the time we pass the peace gets displayed at the front of the sanctuary. Then during the week the poster gets added to the wall of the sanctuary. I loved how the vine runs through all the posters, and wanted to highlight that, so I took green tissue paper and rolled up a pipe cleaner inside it, twisted it a little, then used it to connect the hanging posters. The pipe cleaner allows you to shape the curve of the vine between each poster.

IM: Where did you get the inspiration to use the pipe cleaners to connect the posters together?

Kristen: Our sanctuary has a series of small windows that are great for hanging the posters in a line, right next to each other. But since they would be spaced apart, the natural connection of the vine between each poster would be broken. I’d seen people use brown packaging paper twisted up to look like branches and thought I would try something like that. Since the distance wasn’t too big I decided to use tissue paper to surround a pipe cleaner, so I could do curves and loops. It is a great way to highlight the vine and make the presentation more “alive” and three dimensional.

IM: You mention that the children have been coming up to color the posters for the beginning of the service. What type of feedback have you heard from both the kids and/or their parents?

Kristen: We’ve gotten a positive response from parents, kids and other adults about having the kids color. We’ve also had some adults color too! In fact, we have the posters out at the Wednesday Soup Supper as well so that others can get a start on the poster before Sunday. It has taken some practice (we did this with your Advent posters too), so the kids (and adults) are used to it. I’d say if you have a lot of kids, it would be good to have multiple things to color. The more kids, the louder it can get. But it’s great to hang up their masterpiece right there in the sanctuary in the midst of worship and thank them for their ministry. They are engaged in their own way, taking in the story and prayers even while their working with their hands. And they are beautiful!

IM: That’s so fun. How would you say these posters have added to your church’s Lenten experience this year?

Kristen: The posters have given all the generations of the congregation a shared experience. To watch the “vine” of posters grow, and even the coloring patters change and develop throughout the season is a joint expression of our journey together.

Vine-Posters-2

I’m honored to have been able to be a part of this church (and the other 399 of you out there!) and their Lenten experience. I know there are many others of you who are doing very creative things with the posters (including getting them printed on fabric to be used as banners for Easter) – and I hope it’s been a fun and meaningful addition for your community.

If you’ve also done something creative with the posters, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or just send us a note via our contact page.

Coloring to Connect on a Mission Trip to Mexico

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Since we’ve began creating coloring posters, it’s been exciting to see the fun and creative ways people have used them. We’ve seen children coloring in classes and during a Christmas pageant, youth and adults coloring during fellowship hours, people on sessions and church boards coloring during meetings, creative uses on mission trips and more! There are many ways that coloring posters can create space for relationships to grow, conversations to be had and your community to experience fellowship.

We love sharing some of the ways people are using our resources, and we wanted to let you know about a church who used our coloring posters to develop relationships while on a mission trip. One of our customers, Hope Lutheran Church from Fresno (CA) bought our large 4′ x 3′ coloring posters in Spanish, and took them on a mission trip they went on. You can see from the photos below that the coloring posters were a quick and easy way to begin to develop relationships with the children they were working with.

Adam Knudson, Associate Pastor of Youth and Family Ministries, sent me the below note while they were on their trip:

We are having a great time here in Mexicali with our brothers and sisters. Sometimes there is a language barrier but with coloring these pictures the differences are minimized. Kids, adults, everyone knew exactly what to do and could come and go as they pleased. This was a great resource for our team.

We currently have two sets of our coloring posters with Spanish words, and they are both available as digital downloads. You can use those to print these posters out at whatever size you want

  • Advent Coloring Posters: While these were sold as our Advent Coloring Posters, they can certainly be used for any occasion. These are our largest posters, ready to be printed as 4′ x 3′ posters. The words in the middle of these posters are Amor, Paz, Gozo, Esperanza and Emmanuel.
  • Lenten Coloring Posters: Our newest set of coloring posters includes nine 2′ x 3′ posters. The words/phrases on these posters are Reciba a otros, Dé, Sirva, Escuche, Ame, Vigile, Arriesgue, Tome y Coma, Abandanado, Vaya y Diga.

I know there are lots of churches that go on mission trips over spring break and in the summer, and I just wanted to encourage you to think about how something as simple as a large piece of paper and some crayons and markers could help provide a simple but meaningful activity to do with kids you are serving. Of course, these would work anywhere – and not just for mission trips to Mexico – so if there is a different language you need the posters in, please contact us and we’ll setup a custom order for you.

How have other people been using their coloring posters in creative ways?