Grace and Faith

Today I wanted to take you along as I did some bible journaling. Recently a friend lent me some acrylic paint so I could play around with it. Lots of journalers like to apply acrylic paint with a gift card/reward card for a fun splash of color that keeps ink from bleeding and that you can read through.

The section of scripture I decided to journal on was Ephesians 2:8-9 since I had a really cute "saved by grace" stamp from Illustrated Faith. I love these verses because it really highlights one of the main differences between Christianity and other religions. Our salvation is not something that we have to work for or earn or be good enough to make it. It is a gift from God because of His grace and all we have to do is have faith!

I applied some ivory acrylic paint using a gift card and trying to stay in the margin as much as possible. (If you want a demo, check out youtube. There are quite a few good ones.) This method is a bit messy but you can apply a thin enough layer that you can read the underlying text so that's a plus for bible journaling.

Next, I laid out my acrylic stamps to get an idea of what I'd like my page layout to be. I love the clear acrylic stamps because you can see exactly where you are going to place them! I had the "saved by grace" and "faith" stamps and added in a with because that's the closet thing I had to through. In the end though, I decided to hand write through with my trusty micron pen because I just really liked the way it sounded better.

Once I had the main text on the page, it was time to embellish! Yay for embellishments. These super cute feather stamps were from the same kit as the saved by grace one so I just pulled them out and stamped in coordinating inks. Some people like to really really plan out a page and some people just fly by the seat of their pants. I feel like I fit somewhere in the middle. I do sort of plan out what I want but sometimes I just keep going until it feels right. In this case after I finished the feathers, I felt like I needed to tie in the black a bit more so I added a couple of the three triangles in black scattered on the page just to make things look a bit more cohesive.

To keep the feather stamps off of the text, I stuck down a row of post it notes along the edge of the margin as a mask. Perhaps I should have done that with the acrylics too but I didn't think of it! And I always stamp/paint/gelato/etc with some sort of scrap paper under my bible page to protect the other pages from stuff running off the edge or bleeding through.

Do you like to try new art techniques and tools or do you prefer to stick with tried and true methods?