 Well, hi there! I'm Sandy Olnop, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to be journaling in my Inspire Bible today, doing some simple backgrounds. You don't have to be a fancy artist to do these backgrounds. The Inspire Bible is one that was sent to me by Tyndale. Thank you to them for sharing it with me so that I could share it with you. This is the Bible that has the pre-printed verses in it, and I've shared this before. I want you to read the verses. If you get this Bible, just Pinky Swear with me that you will do that so that you can actually learn something and not just turn this into a coloring book. So today I'm going to be coloring a background for this verse on the right-hand side. What I usually do when I set up my Bible journaling is to try to equal out both sides. So I put a little notebook under the left-hand side, depending on the height that I need to make it sort of flat and a little easier surface to work on. For my palette, I'm going to use a tile, an 89-cent tile from the hardware store, and I'll be using my Hydrus watercolors. Hydrus watercolors I like, especially for this technique, though you can use it with any watercolors because I can just drop the watercolor onto the palette super easy like this. I don't have to mix anything up with a brush or anything. It's just really, really straightforward and simple. You can put some paper underneath of the page, but I'll show you one where I don't do that, and the result is the same. I'm going to use baby wipes to paint with, just regular old baby wipes. I'm going to drop a little bit of water. I'm just using a dropper that I have so that I can just get a little bit of water to water down the color. The Hydrus colors can be really strong. The yellows I found I can use full strength, but some of the other colors, you're going to want to water them down because they're going to be really super strong. Test them on some pages in the back of your Bible just to make sure you're not going to be unhappy with the result. But with the baby wipe, all I had to do is dip it in the color and then just start kind of smooshing it on here. I want a soft sort of flowy watercolor look and not real fancy, not real swanky. I'm just letting the color be on there. Took a clean baby wipe and now I'm just going to move some of that around anywhere where I got some more solid places where I wanted it to be a little bit softer. This watercolor does stay. Like once you put it down, it tends to stay there. You can do a little bit of lifting, a little bit of moving, but if you put down too much color, it's going to be an issue for you. Now, right now you're going to probably look at this and go, Sandy, I can't read that. That's a mess. Don't play with me. I want to be able to read my Bible. Well, I'm going to put another piece of computer paper on top and iron it. This is just a hot iron. You can see exactly how long I'm doing it. This is real time. Doesn't take much at all to just iron over it, both to flatten it out and it will also dry it. You could let it air dry and then do your ironing later as well, but I'm just doing this to show you. Look at how great that comes out once you get the ironing done. I took out the paper because it's just going to be easier on my hand to be able to lay my hand down beside the Bible as I paint the lettering on here. I'm just going to use the same colors or the same color that I already have out on my palette and paint in there. I'm using a silver brush from the Silver Brush Company. Links are in the description down below, but it doesn't matter really what brush you use as long as you can get one that has a small enough point to go into the small lettering. This Bible does have very small, small spaces. So I'm using a number four here. You may want to dodge down to a number two or a number three just because there are many in this particular Bible. They have very small spaces. You could also go in here with your colored pencils and do the rest of the stuff on top of this in colored pencil because there's a little more control if you're not somebody who's familiar with mediums. I put together a Bible journaling class on my website where you can learn a lot about different mediums, which ones go through, which ones don't, and my recommendations for how to test with mediums that you have. But one of the pens that I would recommend if you want to just go in and do your lettering with a pen would be the Micron series of pens. They have black ones. They have colored ones. They have ones with a brush tip as well as just ones that are normal pen size in a bunch of different nibs. So here you can see it came out very simple and beautiful. Doesn't take a whole lot of massive talent or anything to do a beautiful background like this. I thought I'd show you one more and a little more about how I may apply this in a different way. This purple is a really strong color and I wanted to be careful with it. I put some water in it and my palette got a little bit out of control because I probably put more purple on there than I intended originally. I was going to do the whole page in purple but I decided I was going to instead just do a portion of the page in purple right around the rows. I wanted some purple coming up from that corner and then the purple felt too strong already on my baby wipe so I added more water and I'm going to pull color just from the part that has the most water in it first just until I'm sure of exactly how much color I'm pulling in and it's very faint here. So I got a little more confident and started dipping the baby wipe further into the pigment so that I could get a little bit more purple as I went and again on this one it's going to look like a mess until it doesn't so hang tight with me and I'm just going to apply the color with the baby wipe and as I get more confident I can dip deeper into the purple and give myself a little more color and you can do this tapping type of technique and it gives you just a little bit more of a look of mixed watercolor like just this texture that I find very beautiful. Some people don't like that at all and that's perfectly fine too. If you want a smooth color just wipe it across the surface and you can actually get some fairly smooth color over the whole thing so just play around with what it looks like and as I said before play around on those back pages the maps and those sorts of things all of your concordances are great places to try out some techniques before you move into your Bible but here I'm adding some pink now because I decided I was going to go from purple in the corner to pink across the rest. You can see in this right hand side I did do some wiping and got some pretty solid areas but solid in a very light pink so I can still read the words. For me it's still really important to be able to read the scriptures not just have a beautiful thing on here that's going to cover everything up it's not about the art it's about the scriptures so I wanted to make sure that I kept that readable and I'm keeping my edges looking very kind of soft and painterly and then I ironed it and this is what it looks like after ironing so you can see very easily that you can actually see the words nothing comes through on the back just a little haze of color really is all you get on the other side and then I can go in with my brush once again and take those same colors that were on my palette and add my pinks and my reddish color into my flowers and then I'll use the reds and the purples on the words to get a two-tone look on the letters I'm painting the pink on the top and then just changing my brush color to the purple at the bottom and if you're using colors that are very different from each other you may want to rinse out your brush ahead of time the other way you could do it would be would be to paint the purple on the bottom and then the pink on the top and then just let the watercolor blend between the two of them and I'm dabbing off because I wanted a really soft look with the soft background so I dabbed off the color from both of those and my D went out of the lines I want you to see that because this is not about perfection Bible journaling is not about being perfect and creating amazing art it's about spending time in the Word of God if you're not spending time with him you're wasting your time trying to Bible journal so if you'd like to see a flip through of my Bible the video on the left is one that you might want to check out there's also the Bible journaling class on my website you can get a link to that in the description down below as well as the Bible that I'm using and the products that I use to paint with hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet and I will see you guys later on take care and have a great day