 Hello there. My name is Sandy Allnok. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm going to talk about art journaling versus Bible journaling, some of the similarities I find between the two in my practice and some of the differences. And if you haven't done either one, this might serve as a general primer for what you might get out of them. I also have a giveaway to announce at the end of this video, so stick around for that. In the meantime, let's get busy. So let me start by discussing why I don't share much of my art and Bible journaling here on YouTube, and it's all about protecting my privacy and my creativity. When I am creating just out of my gut, if I have the camera on, I start to freeze up and I just, I don't know, something in the art is missing because I get in teaching mode and I get thinking about how I'm going to explain things way too much. When I'm journaling, it's much better to just let all that go. I also do a lot of written journaling in conjunction with my pages that I create, and I found that a lot of people get a little bit snoopy and start trying to read everything that I write. So often, I will just add the text afterward and just not even show it when it's completed, or like on this page, I added it all first and then just painted over it, so I still got to do the journaling, and on this page, I'm just covering part of it, so you can't read it, but it's going to create an interesting texture by just painting more of the same color on top. Let's get going on the similarities, and the first one I want to talk about is the mediums. You can use pretty much any medium in any journal, whether it's a Bible journal or an art journal. You just have to be sensitive to the paper. Generally, art journals are on paper that can handle a little bit more craziness, and Bible paper is thinner. It's like a regular Bible. It just has more space on the side for drawing and painting, and you can use it in a light fashion. You can use it more concerted. You can see my Bible journaling channel for tons of ideas of ways you can use watercolor in your Bible journaling. Here's one where I was using acrylics and making the background painting. I wrote over top of it to do all my journaling, and then painted over top of that. When I'm using acrylics on Bible paper, I'm a little more gentle with it, and I'm just going to dab it on in a really thin fashion, so water down the paint, and then use either a baby wipe or cotton ball or something to put the paint on so I can still read the words. Colored pencil works great for any kind of journaling. This is one of my favorite colored pencil pages that I did, that I went over with pen when I got all the colored pencil work finished, and put a lot of detail in it. You can also use alcohol markers in both, and this one was done in a journal that can handle alcohol marker, and you can use stamping with it. You can draw things, tons of stuff you can do with alcohol markers as well, including creating a page, trimming it down to size on your favorite paper for a medium like alcohol markers, put some adhesive down the gutter of the book, and you can add a page that suits whatever the medium is in whatever book you're working in. So let's talk about journaling goals as another similarity, because they're really both about making art, right? And your goals might change from day to day in both of them. Sometimes you just want to put some color on a page, and that's really it. You're trying to get unstuck from whatever it is that you're trying to think about working on, and sometimes just putting something on a page works great. Sometimes you'll be practicing with a new medium to see how it works or how one thing will layer over top of another medium, and how do they partner together. But for me, I don't do that very often. I consider that to be sketchbook time, and I'll work in a sketchbook rather than an art journal when I'm doing that, because it's all about the art in that case, and I'm trying to learn something about it. So for me, the similarity ends there because the other similarity that I find between the two types of journaling that I find most important is personal growth. Because if I am coming at it with a desire to grow as an artist, to grow in my faith, to grow as a person, then I'm going to approach my page differently in both different types of journaling. I'll either do long-form journaling like this page that I showed you, painting over it, because this is not about having a journal that I'm going to go back and read later. It's about putting something together in the moment so that as I'm working, I'm processing through it, and then when I sit down to do the journaling, either early or later in the project, I'm getting answers to questions that I might have had the whole time. Because when I start writing things out, I write out questions, I write out things I'm confused about, I write out things I'm trying to decide among, and I somehow end up answering my own queries when I'm writing, and that really makes a big difference to me. In Bible journaling, I'm documenting what God has told me, what I've read in the scriptures, what I've understood from them, what I want to change in my life from them, and that's really important to me. Instead of just illustrating the page, which is how a lot of people approach it. They see the word tree in the book, and they want to draw a tree beside it. I want to draw what the meaning is of whatever the verse is. What did it mean to me personally instead of just illustrating a picture? The differences between the two types of journaling are pretty obvious when it comes to number one, which is one is faith-related in its focus, and the other is anything related. You can do Bible journaling in a non-Bible book, in an art journal, but for me it helps to have it in my Bible since I'm in it reading it all the time. When I flip past a page that I have created, I can go back in my memory and remember the lessons that I had learned that caused me to create that page. But my art journal tends to be on art topics because I obsess about art all the time. I'm always thinking about things, and it helps me to put them down on paper, and in a beautiful way it helps me to want to do it. I don't like just writing in a plain book with lines in it. This particular day when I was working on this recently, I was feeling really low. I was feeling like a miserable failure as an artist. Social media has just killed my business in so many ways, and it's looking bleak, and I was feeling like a failure. I was not just looking at it as stuff happens in life, but like I am causing this because I am a terrible person. So I made a page where I had lots of room, empty space for journaling, and what I did was go to my reviews, and I started writing out all the reviews that people have written of my classes and some comments from social media, and I felt better just going through that exercise. So it really helps me in that kind of a way. Another difference is the type of paper that's in the books. Art journals tend to have thicker paper in them, and any kind of sketchbook with thick paper works, anything mixed media, especially if you're going to be using things and gluing stuff down and using thick paints and all that. I even found this board book that I thought was adorable, very small that comes in different sizes, but I filled it with sandiasms because I thought it would be interesting to maybe use some of the jelly prints that I had made one day and put together a book that has the things that I keep saying over and over and over again, because maybe someday I'll look back at that and go, yeah, I remember when I used to yammer on about that. So even if this is not one of those with lots of deep personal journaling in it, it has a lot of those little bits and pieces that are very much me, like me always yelling, hey, tag me if you do something. I'd like to know if I'm making a difference around here. Journaling Bibles come with a couple of different features to them. They're the same Bible paper, but they'll have columns on the left or right where you actually can do the artwork. I tend to spill over into the text, but I just leave everything really thin in terms of paint coverage, so I can still read the words. Some people just want to keep everything to the columns, totally fine, whatever you're comfortable with. Just don't judge anybody else for what they do because we all make our own choices. But there's also a different kind of Bible called an interleaved Bible, and it comes with a blank page in between each printed page. So you can make lots of notes, or you can just make art on those. It is a bigger book because it's got double the pages in it because of those extra pages, but you can either get the interleaved Bible and have the paper there or add some tip ins and just use some paper that's Bible-like. And I'll link some of that down below. Some of my favorite Bible journaling supplies if you'd like to try that yourself. My process for the two types of journaling tends to be different. The art journaling is something that I turn to when I'm just in a state. I don't know where to begin. I don't know what I want to work on, but I need to get something moving because I have deadlines that I set for myself, and I need to get working on something, but I don't know what to do, so sometimes just putting something on paper just gets me started, and it often will get me thinking about what it is that's got me stuck. And then I can start journaling about that and tie it into the art that I'm creating and see what comes of it. Does it make a coherent page or not? Not always, and that's okay. When I'm starting my Bible journaling, when I sit down to do that, I don't just say, hey, I feel like drawing a goat today. Let me see if there's a passage that has a goat in it. I consider that more of illustrating my Bible, and that's not what I do Bible journaling for. I do it to process what I'm hearing from God, and unless I've heard something from God about a goat or learned a lesson from a goat, it doesn't really make a lot of sense for me to put that in my Bible journaling. I do have a whole pile of sketchbooks. You see all those back there? My art journals are among them, but I grab a sketchbook when I just feel like drawing a thing, and I just need to get it out. I'll throw it in a sketchbook because I do some work in my sketchbooks every day. Thus end with my similarities and differences between art journaling and Bible journaling, which means we now get to go to the giveaway, because as an instructor in gratitude junk journaling, I get to give away a class by September 30th, which means you need to get on this right away to a lucky winner. How do you qualify to win? I would like to ask you to replenish my reviews on my website, because I loved reading how much impact the classes that people have taken meant to them. The things they were able to accomplish and the confidence they gained just made me feel like I'm making a difference, and I would love to know what difference I made for you. So go over to art-classes.com and leave a review on a class, on a downloadable, whatever it is that you might have purchased recently, because that makes a big difference to people looking to decide whether or not they want to take a class. If you haven't taken a class lately and you would like a suggestion, I have two that I just put on sale for this week only. One is seeing the scriptures, and that's for Biblejournals who want to know what my crazy process is for looking at the words in a scripture passage and deciding what I'm going to illustrate them with. And there's a whole bunch of exercises in there where you can practice my method and see if it works for you. The second class is Copic art journaling, and that one is from my Copic peeps. I made a whole art journaling class just for you a while back. I think it was in 2020, and it's a lot of fun. It's filled with great techniques that you can use in your regular alcohol marker work. It's not just for the journal, but the journal is going to be really encouraging to your heart as well. Now go forth and leave reviews, because I have to pick a winner on September 30th and submit it, so you need to get on it right quick. All right, I will see you guys later on. Take care and have an awesome, awesome day, and go do some journaling. I'll see you later.