Friday Focus: Come & Craft sessions

The Studio is open on Tuesday evenings from 7:30pm for ‘come & craft’. The aim is for attendees to work on their own projects alongside other artists and crafters. Over the years, there have been card crafters, gift wrappers, crocheters, art journalers, scrapbookers, jewellery makers, Bible journalers and painters. The joy of the session for me is seeing confidence grow, abilities improve and enjoying the chat and interactions between guests.

This is Laurence – he has been coming to the sessions for a couple of years ago and has been learning to paint planes in acrylics. Some learning has been self-directed and some pointers from me. He has benefitted from using my kit and materials – another bonus of the sessions. Below are his paintings, and I think you will appreciate his improvement across the four pieces of art.

Laurence's progress at Come and Craft sessions – acrylic plane painting
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Bible journaling: Creation & nature (BJ-36)

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:

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Makes on Monday: 3D Bible Journaling (commission)

At the end of April I accepted a last minute commission for a retirement gift. The brief was to make a piece featuring the recipient’s favourite Bible verse, Joshua 1:9. The time frame was tight, complicated by a long weekend working in London, but I got it done. I wanted to try out a technique I’d seen on various reels. I had ordered some solid wood pieces and they were perfect for this design:

3D Bible journaling featuring Jonah 1 verse 9, with carved two wood bas relief lion's head, gold leaf and coloured pencil text.
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Bible Journaling: Hope – illustrations using mixed media (BJ-35)

This month’s theme for five new illustrations to Bible journal is ‘hope’. I decided to start work in my new NIV Art Journalling Bible and there’s a little mini-review about it below. In part due to the planned review, I used five different media for my colouring-in just to see how the paper behaved. Conceptually, the illustrations were quite tricky as I didn’t want to repeat the same basic interpretation across all five verses. AI came to the rescue here, helping me develop some ideas for different emphases.

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Bible Journaling: Divine Protection (BJ-34)

For this month’s Bible journaling illustrations, I have pulled together five verses on the loose theme of ‘divine protection’. This is the penultimate set of verses chosen with the help of ChatGPT, and potentially the penultimate set of verses I shall be illustrating in my current journaling Bible. The good news is, though, that I have two new Bibles in which to work – more on that in future posts.

Once again, I have used my Color Cubes for palette inspiration (even using a random number generator to pick them) and Faber-Castell Polychromos colouring pencils.

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Bible Journaling: God’s Guidance (BJ-33)

As promised, despite no longer holding Bible journaling sessions at The Studio, I have continued to journal in my own Bible. Here are five more verses, this time on the loose theme of ‘God’s Guidance’. Given there are so few pages left in my journaling Bible, I enlisted the help of ChatGPT to choose verses specifically from these gaps. I cut and pasted the results into my notes and somewhat lazily didn’t check that the translation was the same. Happily, the meanings are identical to my NIV even if the exact wording isn’t the same.

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Bible Journaling: Family (BJ-32)

I’ve found five verses that referred to us being God’s children and created templates using my normal combination of inspiration and AI image generation. I’ve not used watercolour pencils for a while, so I decided to get them out for these illustrations. Here are my samples, and below the break you can find the download link for my free PDF template for the ‘family’ themed pieces.

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Bible Journaling: Watchful hearts

For this month’s Bible journaling theme, I’ve chosen the loose title of ‘watchful hearts’. I’ve tried to collect verses which encourage anticipation of Christ’s return and getting your heart right with God.

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Bible Journaling: a few more pee-pulpit posters

I continue to design Bible journaling posters for display in my church‘s toilets on an (almost) monthly basis. I call it a pee-pulpit and particularly in the gents’, the posters are front and centre. The designs are a combination of AI-generated backgrounds (that take ages to tweak to fit my mental image) and Photoshop techniques I am learning. I think my last update was in June, so here are a few more displayed since then:

Bible Journaling: Renewed Connection

This evening’s Bible Journaling Session used verses loosely based on the theme of ‘renewed connection’. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but even so, this is a great aim to consider for the year. Alongside coming to the monthly sessions as well, of course…

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