I am so happy to finally be sharing this image with you! It has been a long time in the making, what with the amount of planning I put into this, and the added chaos of prepping to move cross country right in the middle of my trying to bring this all together. But as of last night, this piece is officially done!

Integrity is another image in my Value series (just like Virtue). For those of you who don't know about, or are not members of my church, we have a program for girls aged 12-18 (kind of like Boy and Girl Scouts), called the Young Women Program. In this program the young women learn how to be a better version of themselves by learning important skills that coordinate with 8 values: Faith, Divine Nature, Individual Worth, Knowledge, Choice & Accountability, Good Works, Integrity, and Virtue. Each of these values has a set of scriptures that are meant to help interpret what it is these traits are, as well as a coordinating color. Integrity is purple, and one of the associated scriptures is Job 27: 3-6, which reads:

3 All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils;

 4 My lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit.

 5 God forbid that I should justify you: till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me.

 6 My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.

Now in my last post, I gave a bit of a behind the scenes with my explanation of how I made the shepherd's crook. There is so much more to this image, however, than a simple crook I am having Kacey hold on to. So  I wanted to dive into that a little bit for anyone who is interested to know:

Since the color for Integrity is purple, I made the obvious choice of dressing Kacey in purple. The ornament in her hair, a kanzashi, and the cherry blossom flowers wrapped around her crook are all nods to her Japanese heritage.

The image is representing her staying true to her beliefs and her principles and following the words of our Heavenly Father no matter what may cross her path. To me, this is the definition of integrity.

The shepherd's crook, long recognized as a symbol of our Savior, represents Christ as the Shepherd. He guides us to safety and eternal life through his example. I wanted to have Kacey holding onto this staff as she walked down the path, just as we must hold to the words of our Savior throughout our lives, during easy and difficult times alike.

As you may have guessed, the forest in winter and the fog creeping in represents not only the evils of the world, but more importantly, the difficult times in our lives. It's so easy to think that it's "evilness" that pulls us away from our Heavenly Father. But like a gentle fog rolling in, it's the daily struggles and the sorrows that occur in our lives which obscure our path back to him.

Lastly, I wish there was some really cool biblical or philosophical reason as to why I chose to make the fog green, like the apple Adam and Eve ate was a green apple, or Lucifer wears green clothing. For disclaimer purposes, these are not true! I don't even have a clue what kind of fruit Adam and Eve ate, let alone the color, and if Lucifer had a body, perhaps he would wear lots of different colors! Really, green is just generally recognized as bad: the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz, for example, has green skin, and people are green with envy, right? So I went with it. From an artistic side, I felt like it also added the contrast I needed between the warm tones of Kacey's skin and the path she is walking down and the coldness of the fog creeping in. I wanted it to be clear where the subject was and what I wanted to be considered "good" and what would be considered "evil". 

So there you have it. Hopefully now this piece has a little bit more meaning and significance to you!