Bible Journaling Grace watercolor pencil tutorial

2 Corinthians 12:9

But He said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you,

My power is made perfect in weakness."

Who else needs an extra dose of grace today? Me too! It was a looooong week and I was so grateful for some time yesterday morning to listen to some hymns and paint in my Bible after praying and hearing God whisper to me that I needed to relax all day and give myself some grace. 

I pictured this page in my head and am so happy with how it turned out. It's not perfect, but ... GRACE! I had a fun, relaxing time while working on it. And that's what was needed and important for me at that time.

I would love to share with you how I created this page. I had watercolor pencils for years before I used them. Now they are my go-to art supply and I want to share how easy (and portable) they are!

I have my most used supplies in a little container from Snapware (I got them with a 40% off coupon from Joanns) and this way if I want to get away to a bookstore or the park, I can just grab my Bible and the little container and go. 

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In it I have, 

• a pencil and an eraser
• PITT pens (I constantly use the xs and s sizes)
• a white pen
• watercolor pencils (both Staedtler Karat and Prismacolor) both come in different quantities. I was gifted 36 of the Karats 20 years ago and purchased the 24 pack of Prismacolors 2 years ago. I love the brighter color options in the Karats and they "activate" very well, but the Prismacolors go on buttery smooth and blend nicely. 
• and 3 waterbrushes

Ok, let's get started.

First, I sketched my design with a pencil. I knew I wanted the word "grace" in bold with different flowers behind. My go-to flowers when doodling are a daisy (small circle with a lot of long petals), a sunflower (a large circle with tiny half-circle petals), a rose (a circle that spirals in to the center), and a coneflower (a half circle on top with 5 petals below). I allowed the flowers to overlap and planned to clean them up during the next step.

Once I was happy with the sketch, I inked the lines I liked starting with the word. Then I moved on to the daisies. As I inked the other flowers, I omitted certain lines to make them appear under the daisies and the word. I prefer the Pitt pens as they are waterproof and do not bleed when I activate the watercolor pencils.

Now the fun step... coloring! I picked out my favorite colors and made sure to get 2 or 3 shades of each color. 

I started with the lighter color and then added shadows with the darker color. For example, I colored the rose a light pink and then added darker pink to some of the petals (specifically on the bottom left of each element).

Keep coloring and shading as much or as little as you want.

And now on to step 4. Activate! I use a waterbrush... again for the convenience and ease of portability. It is a paintbrush that houses it's own water supply in the handle and the water wets the bristles when you gently squeeze the handle. I pick the lightest color first (yellow here) and gently swipe the brush over the colored areas. After activating a shaded area, I wipe the brush on a tissue to get the color off or else it will transfer the darker, shaded color to the next lighter yellow area I activate.

Repeat this process (cleaning your brush between colors) for all flowers. Keep in mind that if you activate the purple coneflower petals before the blue tops dry, the purple will run into the blue. Fortunately, since the Bible pages are so thin and such a small amount of water is used, each color dries quickly.

Now when coloring the background green, I used a different technique. Instead of coloring + activating, I dabbed the wet brush directly on to the pencil thus "lifting" off some of the color and then put the brush directly to the page (as if I were painting with actual watercolors). This allowed me to control how intense or diluted the color was in different areas. 

Once dry I noticed that the word had faded a bit from the water (I had used a different pen). So I simply went over it again and it made it nice and bold... standing out from the outlines of the flowers even more. Tada!!!

I finish my pages by "highlighting" the verse with the above watercolor technique, adding a heart on the verse number, and then signing and dating it. It's funny to look back over pages now and see the date and remember "oh yeah, I was sitting in this room painting and God was helping me go through this season or that circumstance."

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial for simple, easy, fun Bible Journaling. You are creative! God created all of us in His image and as the Creator, He made us creative. Give yourself some grace, have some fun, and get to doodling His promises to you!!!

Love,
:) Ann

PS - I did do a few mixed media pages last weekend and hope to share those with you soon.

How to create quick and easy background pages for art journals and mixed media projects - PART 2

Hello again. 

Here's a little addition to my last tutorial on creating quick and easy backgrounds (found HERE). All four of the pages above were created at the same time in about 45 minutes. 

For the following two pages, I started them as described in part 1, but then went a bit overboard with drops of very wet acrylic paint.

For this pink page, I began by covering my paper (which is Strathmore Mixed Media Visual Journal paper, 140 lb, vellum finish, 9x12") in the method described in the previous tutorial. This piece was first painted with orange and blue. Then I scraped on the pink with an old credit card. Next, I did the whole "spritz water and let set for a minute then pat dry" thing.

Then I added approximately 3 parts water to 1 part acrylic paint on my palette. I mixed it well with a paintbrush and then sopped up as much paint as the brush could hold. And then flick... I held the brush over my paper and tapped it with my index finger causing big blobby drops of wonderfulness to fall to the page.

Yummy! I'd recommend not moving your page if you want the paint drops to dry as is. If you want them to run down your page, well then simply tilt up your paper and let them run.

I seriously have a problem with the Folk Art paint colors Calypso Sky and Tangerine.

Here's another page I made using the exact same method.

See... my problem with orange and blue continues...

This one is splattered with "Brilliant Pink" paint. Oh the texture!

How easy and quick!!! I hope you enjoyed this. Now to decide what to put on these fun backgrounds...

Peace and Love,
:) Ann

How to create quick and easy background pages for art journals and mixed media projects

Hi! I'm super excited about this post! 

I'm taking Life Book 2014 the amazing year long art course by Tamara Laporte and several dozen other top notch artists, but I have been in a bit of a creative slump lately. Today, I decided to forget about assignments and how behind I am and just play and make lots of yummy backgrounds. 

I combined a few mixed media techniques I learned last year (and will give credit where credit is delightfully due), but tried to keep it simple and fun. Ok, enough rambling, let's paint!!!

Over the weekend, I purchased some awesome (cheap!) cotton yarn from Walmart and decided to use these colors for my palette.

I globbed a bunch of Folk Art craft acrylic paint onto a foam plate. 

The colors I used were (most of which I got from Walmart too):

• 901 wicker white
• 627 tangerine
• 509 sunny yellow
• 954 fresh foliage
• 524 calypso sky
• 2574 brilliant pink

FYI, I'm addicted to the Calypso Sky color and I think I've used it in every Life Book painting I've done this year. I might need help...

Step 1. Paint some blobs everywhere sticking to two or three colors in the same family (warm in this case - yellow, orange, pink). Let dry -OR- if you're impatient like me, move along...

Step 2. Cover entire page in blue. You can use a brush or scrape on a thin layer using an old credit card/store rewards card/gift card/etc. 

Step 3. WHILE WET, spray page with clean water from a spray bottle (you could also flick water on the page with a clean, wet paint brush).

Step 4. Wait impatiently for 1 minute. This will allow the water to loosen up the most recent layer of paint. (image above)

Step 5. After 1 minute, take 1 or 2 sheets of paper towel and lay it down on painting and press firmly. When you lift off the paper towel, the spots where water was on the blue paint will come up and reveal the colors underneath. (image below)

***NOTE: steps 3-5 were inspired from Life Book 2013 lessons 

by Kelly Hoernig and Joann Loftus. 

I'm sure this technique has been around for forever, but I first learned it through these amazing ladies. :) Check them out!

Step 6. I felt the background needed some grounding so I added green paint around the borders with a dry brush and dabbed with a paper towel so there wouldn't be a harsh paint line. The green is more vibrant, but this was taken with my cell phone with paint-covered hands!

Ta da!!! Below are some detail images.   

Ooohhhh!!! How fun!

So by this point I had some creative mojo back and continued on with a similar process and made the 4 pages in the title image in under an hour (stopping to take some pics too). Below is one of my favorite pages. Finished, it reminds me of candy... yum...

But here's how it began... What?!?!

Same color palette as before (in fact this was my attempt to use up all the leftover paint on my plate).

I coated it with blue like before and sprayed it with water like before too. 

Here's what part of it looked like after patting off water with paper towel. A lot of the paper towels turn out pretty cool too, so I may turn them into flowers or something in another project. 

And I repeated the above with white paint. I had a ton of it out and it was humid and drying up quickly.

And here's a detail of this yummy page. I hope you enjoyed this and I will be posting the extra technique I did on the other two pages soon. Enjoy!

Be blessed,

:) Ann