For my Bible journaling this month, I chose five verses on the theme of worship and devotion. They have very different expressions of what worship looks like, reflected in my illustrations. I tried to find concepts that didn’t just have hands raised, but that image of worship and devotion is as absolutely intrinsic as bowing down. More on that further down the post. In the meantime, here’re the five illustrations:
Exodus 15:2 — He is my God
I worked with ChatGPT to create the continuous line figure. The colour scheme reflects the end of a very involved day next to the water. The typography does the heavy lifting, emphasising a personal recognition of God and a choice to praise.
Isaiah 6:3 — Holy Holy Holy
The richness of the imagery for this verse is extraordinaryly difficult to capture. We have heavenly worship meeting the whole of creation reflecting the glory of God, including us mere mortals. Yellows and golds hopefully convey a sense of glory radiating.
John 4:23 — In the Spirit and in Truth
I originally wanted to create the typography to have the worshipper as a negative space – a literal ‘in’. That didn’t quite make it from brain to paper, but tying the colour gradients together hopefully conveys the same idea. Simple in comparison to the other illustrations, but no less an impact.
Revelation 4:11 — Worthy to Receive Power
To avoid some of the more obvious interpretations of this verse, I played around with the idea of handing earthly power over to God. The open hands receiving the crowns as symbols of authority seemed a good concept to follow. I deliberately used warm grey tones for the arms so that the gold and reds really stood out. The text was a good place to reprise the ruby red to keep the palette cohesive.
Hebrews 13:15 — A Sacrifice of Praise
The image had to be lively, packed full of energy and exuberance, with a colour scheme to match. ChatGPT did a great job of interpreting my ideas into a more abstract image. Claude AI followed my brief for a ‘festival gaudy’ palette. I struggle with the concept of conveying ‘sacrifice’ and all that entails so kept the typography unadorned and formal, with a more playful font for ‘praise’.
Using AI to assist the creative process
I’m learning more each month about how to interact with AI models. For instance, none of the apps I use currently are able to cross-reference different threads of conversation, even within the same ‘project’. If you don’t access the same thread, you pretty much have to start the discussion from scratch.
I don’t have a subscription to Claude, so its memory is limited. However, we did find a way for it to memorise the Faber Castell Polychromos pencil colours and RGB equivalents – by recording the URL of the pages it found the information on. In future, I will just remind it to refer back to the source. Armed with that information though, Claude was much better at offering colour palette ideas than ChatGPT has been in the past.
And back to the perennial critique of AI – ‘it does all the creative work’. I can tell you it takes a fair bit of artistic descriptions, repetition of required elements in prompts and finding out which AI does the best job, as well as post-editing to get thought into image. Models used for these illustrations: ChatGPT, Claude AI, NanoBanana (via Adobe Photoshop).
