Mindablaze» free wallpaper

Jesus, Meditation and Visual Aids – Part 1

Mike Askew — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:53:32 +0000

When I show up in the mornings to spend some time with God, many times I jump straight to what is important to me – petitioning for my needs. Recently at a training retreat, I was encouraged to change this up a bit. The suggestion was to enter my time seeking God by meditating on or focusing on who He is. The goal would be to first sit and consider the many traits of my creator before presenting my requests.

When setting out to try this, my mind was drawn to first meditating on the names of Jesus, the Son of God. Being a very visual person, to help with this I pulled together a list of names for Jesus in a text document. This list did the trick for me if I had my laptop, but not so well if I did not. So, what had to be the solution? You guessed it – a series of iPhone Wallpapers.

This is the first of the series. My plan is to create one for each day of the week. I hope this might help me take a few moments throughout the day to recalibrate by reflecting on the names and qualities of Christ. If you are a visual sort, perhaps it would be useful to you also.

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See this wallpaper on an iPhone and get download instructions here.

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Sola Cheesia Pizza – A John Calvin Original

Mike Askew — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:45:37 +0000

While reading about the Five Solas of the Reformation, I began wondering what John Calvin might pursue if he got an entrepreneural itch in his mid 30′s. My guess was that he would open a pizzeria and name it Reformation Pizza. I think he would market only five pizza variations on his menu. What would be unique about his pizzas would be the focus on single toppings only. The headliner flavor would be Sola Cheesia – Cheese Alone.

Can you guess what the other four flavors would be? Well, you know one of them would have to be Sola Pepperonia – Pepperoni Alone. Maybe another would be Sola Saucius – Sauce Alone? What flavors do you think would round out Calvin’s menu?

ANY_CHARACTER_HERE

See the wallpaper on an iPhone and get download instructions here.

ANY_CHARACTER_HERE

RGB Ants – Free IPhone Wallpaper

Mike Askew — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:48:04 +0000

This wallpaper project was an experiment in combining a couple of different filter techniques in PhotoShop Elements 6.0. The goal was to take a grayscale image of an ant and spice it up with some color and shine. I could have taken the boring route and just replaced the grayscale with monochromatic red, green or blue. Instead, I used a little diffuse glow and plastic wrap filter effects to give the ants some pop.

Here is the recipe:

Set the background color to red.
Apply Filter/Distort/Diffuse Glow effect to the image layer.
Apply Filter/Artistic/Plastic Wrap to the image layer.
Duplicate the image layer.
Select the duplicate and apply Image/Rotate/Invert Selection Vertically
Rotate and move the reflected image layer under the original image
Set layer transparency to 25%.
Select both layers and merge layers.
Repeat using different colors.