A Higher Game – Colored Pencil Drawing

About two years ago, I was a guest on what was then called the Atheist Pastor Podcast. The host had invited me to share my story about how I lost my faith after serving as an evangelical missionary to China; but in addition to that, we talked about another issue that is now much closer to my heart: tribalism.

It had become increasingly clear to me that the greatest threat to America’s future (and humanity’s) was our own tribalism. In the face of enormous problems that threaten all of us, we have been unable to make progress because we’re too caught up in petty intertribal conflicts. All we can think about is “owning” the other side.

In the interview, I presented the following metaphor: Humanity is in a chess game against the devil, and as the devil gradually strengthens his position and prepares to checkmate us, we’re gathered around nine squares in the back of the board, playing a stupid, petty game of tic-tac-toe. What we need to do is play a higher game.

For several months, I fantasized about drawing or painting the metaphor. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to do it justice, but eventually I decided to give it a shot — and I went all-out. After five months, I had a drawing that I’m tremendously proud of. Below are some photos documenting the process.

I began by taking dozens of pictures of myself sitting at a chessboard in different positions in order to build the composition of the piece. Using those photos as reference, I produced the following underdrawing:

I decided to start coloring the characters in the foreground first, using blue on the left and red on the right to match the traditional political spectrum. I was nervous about coloring their flesh, so I began with their clothes. Here’s the blue guy:

I was especially pleased with the buttons on his jacket and the wrinkles and creases in his pants. Then I colored the red guy’s clothes:

I wasn’t very happy with the red guy’s pants, but I really liked his tie and the buttons on his jacket. After that, it was time to color some flesh. I started with the blue guy’s hand, figuring that if I messed it up, it wouldn’t be too big a deal. But I ended up being really pleased with it:

I then finished the hands and faces of both guys in the foreground. Their faces ended up looking a little more wooden than I would have liked, but they weren’t bad. I wasn’t pleased with the blue guy’s hair, so I decided to wait a bit before doing the other guy’s hair:

I decided to tackle the chess pieces next. Getting the chrome look was a worrisome challenge, but using various shades of gray, I achieved a very nice effect. And I really liked taking pictures of the pawns with my hand in front of them as if I were holding them between my fingers!

The rest of the pieces turned out well — especially the black knight, I thought. And then it was time for the board itself. The board I was using as a model had beautiful wood grain, and I wanted to capture it as closely as possible. I started with the light squares:

When I finished the board, I was feeling great. I was especially proud of the perspective, the highlights, and the reflections. It really felt to me like it was coming out of the page:

Now for the devil. I’d been putting him off because up to this point, I’d been able to rely on my photos for models. But although I had a photo of myself (and a colleague) posing as the devil, I didn’t want the devil to look just like a regular person. I thought for a long time and settled on a look inspired by the character Te Kā in the movie Moana, with charred, cracked flesh haloed by flames:

I still wasn’t sure how I should color the devil’s face, so I punted again and began working on the background. I wanted this chess game to have a cosmic feel to it, so I used space scenes. On the left, I drew the famous “pillars of creation” (a nebula about 7,000 light-years away from Earth), and on the right, a spiral galaxy:

Finally, I colored the devil’s face. It didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked, but it didn’t ruin the drawing:

That was five months of work. The title is A Higher Game — because that’s what it’s saying we need to play. I really wish it could be in an exhibit somewhere, because I believe the concept is truly important, and (if I do say so myself) it’s some damn good colored pencil work.

If you want to buy a high-resolution poster of it, you can do so here at my store on Spreadshirt.

Our Most Costly War Is One We Won’t Even Acknowledge

I ran across the above graphic on Twitter, and I thought its point was quite powerful. It’s based on a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof that was written after the slaying of two journalists in Virginia back in 2015 and was verified on Politifact.

What it says to me is that without knowing it, we’ve been engaged in a very real war right here on American soil — a more costly one than any of the others we’ve ever fought. We freak out over terrorism — which is indeed a real and frightening threat — but perhaps we ought to be devoting more resources to combating routine gun violence (which is a bigger problem precisely because it has become “routine”).

The question, of course, is what to do about it. Some simple regulations might help. Kristof writes:

Gun proponents often say things to me like: What about cars? They kill, too, but we don’t try to ban them!

Cars are actually the best example of the public health approach that we should apply to guns. Over the decades, we have systematically taken steps to make cars safer: We adopted seatbelts and airbags, limited licenses for teenage drivers, cracked down on drunken driving and established roundabouts and better crosswalks, auto safety inspections and rules about texting while driving.

And then there are people who assert that we’d be safer if more people carried guns (an idea that conjures an image of the Wild West in my mind). To them, I want to ask: If that were true, then shouldn’t it be the case that in places where more people carry concealed handguns, the percentage of self-defense shootings ought to be higher than in other places? And shouldn’t it be possible to show that the percentage of overall shootings that are justified acts of self-defense increases when conceal-carry laws are enacted and more people begin to carry guns? For that matter, shouldn’t we hear about self-defense shootings much more often than we do?

Maybe the logic behind the above questions is flawed. But even if that’s the case, I’m sure they could be modified into a logically valid form. And it should be easy to do some research and find the answers. With a little research, it really is possible to figure out once and for all what kinds of action need to be taken in order to reduce gun violence. Right?

Oh, yeah. Congress has banned research on gun violence. And it’s the NRA that lobbied for the ban. Which is funny, because the NRA states with great confidence that more guns are better, and more guns make us safer. But there’s something funny going on here, because if that were true, the research would bear it out.

What is the NRA afraid of? They should be encouraging such investigations if they are so confident that guns make America a better place. Until they do so, they might as well just admit what they clearly know to be true: Common sense gun regulations and/or fewer guns would result in less gun violence, making America much safer.

In the meantime, we’re losing a war.

Please go here and sign the petition to end the ban on gun violence research.