EDDIE DANIELS – I’m writing this blog from my hotel room after Day 3 of Creation 2010. The Creation Festival is a yearly music festival nestled in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania. The easiest way to describe it is to call it the “Christian Woodstock.” The radio station I work for goes up each year, we set up inside a trailer, and we try to get as many of the performing artists to pop in for an interview as possible. I’m always in charge of filming the interviews and then I spend the next few weeks at work editing them down and posting them on the station’s YouTube page.

This year we did something a little different. For those of you who don’t know, I enjoy drawing doodles. This year I doodled all of the artists appearing at the 4-day festival (43 of them in all). We compiled the black-and-white drawings into a collection we called the Creation Coloring book. Then, we brought the book with us and when the artists came through for their interview, we had them color and autograph their page in the coloring book. We’ll be posting the book on eBay and donating all the money received from the auction to Compassion International.

I gotta tell you, it’s been a blast so far. Not only has it been fun seeing the artists react to their doodle, but it’s also been fun hanging out with them for a few minutes. I’ve captured some really cool moments on video so far, and we still have one more day to go.

Here’s a brief rundown of some highlights the first few days:

• We got to meet Carlos Whittaker, who’s just as much fun to be around in person as he is to read his blog.
• We got a chance to hang out with our pal Bob Lenz, an amazing speaker who has one of the biggest hearts around(maybe because he’s also one of the biggest guys around)
• As far as pure hilarious moments go, I never thought we’d be able to top David Crowder yelling out the trailer at a kid with “Jimmy” printed on his shirt. Chris and Conrad proved me wrong.
• Mark Gungor, one of the most excited and excitable guys I’ve been around, gave some great insights into marriage that were so simple I was a little embarrassed I hadn’t thought of them already
• We have a Wii with MarioKart in our trailer. It’s a nice break for the artists from the usual standard radio interviews they probably go through and it’s fun to see their faces light up when they see the Wii waiting to be played. Of all the bands at Creation, you probably wouldn’t have expected that the band who had the hardest time tearing themselves away from the Wii was Casting Crowns. True story.
• DecembeRadio really seemed to enjoy their doodle and they were a lot of fun to joke and hang with
• B Reith sat down and really took time to color his doodle while Kristi Leigh interviewed him. He said he would soon be switching his Facebook profile picture to his doodle. Nice!
• Chris Tomlin was very kind and friendly and seemed to genuinely enjoy his time in the trailer.
• Thi’sl and J’Son were simultaneously hilarious and moving. Watching them film each other with their iPhones as they colored their doodles was entertaining to say the least.
• It was my first time meeting the guys from House of Heroes and it was worth the wait.
• It was good to see Matt MacDonald from The Classic Crime once again and when he realized we were the guys from last year who had the Wii, his face lit up and he was ready to race once again.
• Both We As Human and Abandon went all out coloring in their doodles and we were quite impressed with their style.

There was more, but…well…I’ll let you see for yourselves. Starting next week I’ll begin posting the videos of our time at Creation so you can see some of it for yourself. Unfortunately we weren’t able to catch up with the Newsboys or TobyMac or our old pal Trevor from Thousand Foot Krutch, but we’re having a good time.

When you see some of the videos, you’ll get what I’m talking about. Until then…well…here’s the David Crowder video from 2007 I mentioned earlier. The one where he yells at the kid with JIMMY on his shirt. Still cracks me up.