Bible Journaling: five more examples

Here are five more Bible journaling illustrations, complete with a free downloadable outline. I’ve been getting in some practice with watercolour pencils as my next Bible journaling session will be featuring them. Another version of watercolour is using studio safe solvents to move around the wax carrier for the Polychromos pencils, giving much the same effect (though waterproof of course). The solvent is less likely to swell the paper fibres compared to water and is my preferred technique, though the effect is less translucent than watercolour.

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Bible Journaling: When it all goes wrong…

As with everything internet, I tend to only post things I am happy with. It’s the same with quality control in The Studio – it only goes out of the door if either my guest is happy, or I’m happy (and hopefully both) with the result of hard work. Today I’m going to share the process that led to this illustration:

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Bible Journaling: New Year

Happy New Year to all my loyal readers and Studio guests! A new year is a great time to resolve to start something new – it just so happens I’m starting a new teaching session each month looking at Bible journaling. It’ll be on the third Monday evening, starting in January. For the first session, we’ll look at materials and media, as well as embarking on our first journaling.

In the meantime, I’ve done some more journaling that I thought I would share. First up, a verse for the new year in both my NIV and NLT journaling Bibles:

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Bible Journaling: Stencils

I recently took up bullet journaling as a means of recording what I intended to do each week alongside what I actually did (or didn’t). I thought it would be helpful to have some visual prompts for my pages, so invested in a set of stencils designed for bullet journalers. Well, the bullet journaling lasted about 8 months, but the stencils hung around and I started using them in my Bible journaling instead. There was just one problem – they were too big to use in the margins of my journaling Bible. So, this week, I created my own to fit!

Here are some journal entries demonstrating my stencils in use:

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Bible Journaling: Another November release

I’m not exactly busy in The Studio at the moment – I’m no longer doing TV prep and I’m not on any design teams, so I’m left to my own devices. I have plenty of time, as a result, to do my own thing. At the moment, it’s developing tangle patterns and Bible journaling – and prepping for my craft stall on Friday and Saturday (Lutterworth Town Hall, F: 5-9pm, S:10am – 4pm if you’re interested).

For this release of Bible journaled verses, I kept to my general style, but I have added a couple of sketches (one thanks to free-to-use Armour of God from ChristianityCove.com). I also added a motivational phrase to illustrate the verse – this is the first time I have used text other than the verse itself. As is now normal, I have used coloured pencils and fine tip pigment pens to avoid bleed-through.

Now seems to be a good opportunity for a plug… Starting on the third Monday in January, I will be hosting a Bible Journaling Session here at The Studio from 7:30-10pm, £5. We’ll look at materials and methods and then have themes for the evenings such as lettering, colouring techniques and using different media to decorate our Bibles.

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Bible Journaling: Old & New

I’ve been busy Bible journaling, trying to get back into the habit of reading and reflecting on what it is I am drawing. I’ve found my own style now, and my process still begins with choosing the words or phrases I’d like the emphasis to rest on in my illustration. Next is playing with typography, something I now prefer to do on screen – the undo function creases the page less than trying to rub out pencil lines! Then follows adding illustrations where appropriate, before tracing and colouring into my Bible.

One benefit of working in this way is that there is a FREE downloadable version containing all five outlines for you to print out and do your own thing with… just click the button:

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Bible Journaling: The Bishop’s School of Prayer Pair

For last week’s Bishop’s School of Prayer, I created two more print-and-colour Bible journaling illustrations. They weren’t used in the end as I (strongly) encouraged workshop participants to create their own.

To download a free copy of these illustrations for your own use, click button:

Bible Journaling: Keep on Knocking

I’ve tried another bible journaling experiment – this time using an image transfer technique. The text and image are printed on a laser printer, and the toner is essentially glued to the page and the paper is taken off. The colouring behind the text is acrylic paint, dabbed on and off with a baby wipe. A little tweaking with coloured pencils and it’s turned out ok, I think.

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Bible Journaling: three more examples

So February turned out to be a bit quiet on the daily bible journaling. I managed three days. Well, it was a short month. Here are two…

The above were drawn freehand, with a couple of stencil flourishes. I’ve started pencilling outlines first after finding this, though taking a little longer, gave better outcomes. I still enjoy designing with more fonts than I can draw, so for my next verse, Psalm 8:1, I created a digital version first and traced it onto my Bible margin for colouring.As a quick experiment, I’ve saved the digital image as a PDF and you can download it below if you’d like to add it to your own Bible. If there’s interest, I’ll be sure to pop up some more printables in the future (that’s the experiment bit).

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