Now that I have moved into my new journaling Bible, I’m able to choose new verses and revisit old ones with new illustrations. This month, I have selected five verses on a theme of creation and nature and created art journaling designs for each:
Design considerations
The first verse of the Bible turned out to be a tricky one to illustrate. There’s the whole thing about popping sky and the Earth in there, but when you read verse 2, everything is dark. A black page would have been another way to go, but I read on and wanted to find a way to show the Spirit of God hovering over the waters. Black India ink, black coloured pencil and gold metallic pens brought it to life.
The second features the Hebrew word for ‘glory’. Again, it was tempting to follow the whole heaven-as-cloudy-sky trope but that wasn’t where I wanted to go. The word is gilded with imitation gold-leaf and coloured with Polychromos colouring pencils.
For the verse from Isaiah, I did follow the obvious path for the illustrations. I used darker shades of colour to emphasise the main words and like the effect.
Nehemiah’s verse needed something so inidicative of life: what better than a strand of DNA? Both this and the previous illustration took a bit of doing to learn how to use meshes to distort text in Adobe Illustrator to fit the curves.
And finally, a simple collage of animal silhouettes. I noticed while I was drawing it that most of the sea creatures disappeared when deleting background elements to place the text. The jellyfish will just have to represent all the things that swim in the sea.
used for my creation & nature illustrations
- NIV Art Bible
- Faber-Castell Polychromos colouring pencils
- Speedball imitation gold leaf, used with Zig 2-way glue pen (allow to dry and then apply gilding)
- Unipin black pigment fineliners (various widths)
- Pebeo India Ink
- Posca pens: gold & white
- Polar matte varnish spray
- Image inspirations/adaptations based from Creative Fabrica & Wikipedia
Free downloadable template
Do let me know if you have used the template in your own Bible and share your work with me – I’d love to see it and if you’re ok with it, share it on my Reader’s Gallery page to inspire others. Get in touch using the email link in the sidebar.