My Story.
I’m Rev. Justin Reddick, a prison chaplain, artist, and creator of Art the Hard Way. After years of using creativity alongside people living in some of America’s most restrictive environments, I built this work to make the same gifts—hope, expression, and a deeper sense of purpose—accessible beyond prison walls.
Featured Coloring Books.
Urban Bloom finds beauty in the places where the city has been worn down, painted over, cracked open, and reclaimed. Across three visual movements and 24 original botanical coloring pages, bold flowers emerge from concrete walls, loading docks, rooftops, gardens, transit plazas, and other unexpected urban spaces.
This is a coloring book about resilience, imagination, and the life that continues to push through difficult places. Urban Bloom invites you to slow down, look more closely, and discover what beauty might be waiting to grow where you least expect it.
Mona Lisa’s Grand Tour takes one of the world’s most recognizable faces beyond the walls of the Louvre and into a playful journey through art, culture, history, and imagination. Across each page, Mona Lisa steps into a different setting, style, or unexpected adventure—inviting you to reinterpret a familiar masterpiece in an entirely new way.
Designed for relaxation, curiosity, and creative exploration, Mona Lisa’s Grand Tour offers a fresh way to engage with art history—one destination, one transformation, and one coloring page at a time.
Urban Wilds: Happy Accidents & Hard Lines brings two restless visual languages together: the open scale of mountains, rivers, deserts, and forests, and the improvised marks of graffiti, rail yards, concrete, and abandoned structures.
Each illustration gives you room to build a world through color. Follow the atmosphere already present, introduce bold graffiti-inspired combinations, or completely reinvent the landscape. Urban Wilds is an invitation to explore what happens when open country and urban expression refuse to remain separate.
The Freedom Toolkit..
The Freedom Toolkit helps people explore what matters to them, develop their creative voice, and make purposeful work through guided Art Talks and reflection.
It can be used independently or adapted for groups in churches, schools, nonprofits, community programs, and correctional settings. No art experience is required—only a willingness to begin.
The Freedom Tool Kit Workbook is a guided creative practice for looking closely, experimenting freely, and building work with greater intention.
Through three movements—Look Closer, Find Your Thread, and Build the Work—the workbook combines art-based lessons, practical exercises, planning pages, and reflection prompts. Whether you are beginning again or developing an existing creative practice, these pages provide structure without taking away your voice.
You already carry material. This workbook helps you begin shaping it.
The Freedom Toolkit Companion Journal is a personal space for reflection, discovery, and the ideas that continue after the activity ends.
Designed to accompany The Freedom Toolkit Workbook, this journal offers room to sketch, map, collect, plan, document, and follow what keeps returning. Its open pages and thoughtful prompts help you connect creative discoveries to your experiences, questions, and growth.
The work may finish before the discovery does. This journal gives that discovery somewhere to continue.
The Freedom Toolkit Bundle brings the workbook and companion journal together as one complete creative experience.
The workbook provides the structure—guided art talks, practical exercises, planning tools, and prompts that help you identify what matters and turn it into purposeful work. The companion journal creates room to go deeper, reflect honestly, and record the ideas, questions, and discoveries that emerge along the way.
Used together, these books help you move from exploration to action without forcing you into someone else’s definition of creativity or freedom. Start where you are, use what you have, and build a practice that belongs to you.
Made Inside.
A Focused Path for the Incarcerated
Made Inside is a ten-part creative guide designed for people living and creating within confinement. Through accessible Art Talks and reflection, it helps artists build skills, explore their personal voice, and create meaningful work with whatever materials are available.
$24.95
Let’s Build Something Meaningful—Together
Art the Hard Way partners with individuals, families, educators, churches, counselors, community programs, and institutions to make creativity more accessible and purposeful.
Whether you need resources, a customized project, or support building a creative program, we’ll help shape an approach that fits your people and goals.
Explore our current partners below.
Hear from the artists.
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"Trying to make art in prison is tough, and Art the Hard Way gets that. This place is hard on you, but art has been my way to cope and feel like I'm building something. It’s not just about drawing; it’s about finding a new identity."
- Art the Hard Way, Program Participant
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"This program profoundly changed my understanding of art and my own ability to express it."
- Art the Hard Way, Program Volunteer
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"This program has largely reinforced my identity as a unique artist with unconventional thinking, highlighting my strength in creating new mediums."
- Art the Hard Way, Program Participant