Work towards the re-launch of the Radiant Light website

The first draft of the new Radiant Light website will be re-launched in a few weeks at www.radiantlight.org.uk Developments to the website are coming along well.  Since Summer 2008, we have scanned over 1,000 paintings by Elizabeth Wang as high quality scans. She has painted most of these in the past  20 years. The hard work now is putting code numbers on these scans, writing explanatory titles and giving keywords to each picture, to help people search for pictures under many topics.  We would be grateful for prayers for this work. As there are so many pictures newly scanned, we will start by putting the first batch of a few hundred on the first draft of the Radiant Light website, in the next month or so.  It will be possible for people to download these pictures in high quality. There will be no charge for non-commercial users who want to store and print the pictures for personal use or catechesis or evangelization. 

The keywords will make it much easier for teachers, priests, catechists and people at home to search for pictures according to themes (e.g. forgiveness, Mass, saints, charity, Pentecost, Gospel, consecration), and will enable us to create online exhibitions according to subject matter. Eventually we hope to have a list of about 100 main topics which will be similar to the kind of topics you would find in a Catechism index (e.g. Holy Trinity, baptism, love, Church, Blessed Virgin Mary, justice, salvation, prayer, suffering, Holy Spirit, Heaven, grace, hope). If a person clicks on any of these, all of the pictures which are about these topics will appear in an online exhibition.

At the moment the online Art Gallery has about 350 pictures. 30 of these are available as free high quality downloads, but the rest are low quality. We will be replacing all the current pictures with high quality versions, and will also be adding many other pictures.  Eventually these will also include scans of about 200 watercolour pictures which Elizabeth has painted in the past year. Not only will people be able to download these for non-commercial use, but they will be able to copy these images onto MP3 players and mobile phones to view them on the move. It is hoped that this will be a great resource for the Church, a kind of visual catechism for a visual age.