Bible Journal - Entering His Gates with Praise

Years ago, we used to sing a song that will still be familiar to a lot of you: "We shall enter His gates with thanksgiving in my heart, we shall enter His courts with praise. We shall say this is the day that the Lord has made. We will rejoice, for He has made us glad." The pages that awaited me in today's Inspire Praise journaling Bible, reminded me of this song. I invite you to sing along as we decorate these two pages, bringing honour and praises to a very deserving God and Father. On an arty level, we will be using a very limited palette to colour the pages with pencils and fineliners. It will also be the first time that we use stickers to decorate our pages. It is also the first time we will not treat an entire page with gesso, but only the journaling on the page. Read on to find out more.

These are the two pages that I had to deal with today. I fell absolutely in love with those heavy doors the moment I saw them, and could hardly wait to get to these two pages. It is interesting to know which pictures appeal to one, and which leave you unmoved. I was determined, right from the onset, to use nothing but normal colouring pencils on this page.

I opted to use my set of 70 Derwent Coloursoft pencils, as I wanted to use a variety of browns on the wooden doors and posts.

I did not do a physical count, but when I was done with the doors, I must have used about seven different shades of brown. I opted to use black on the twirls in front of the windows, giving it the appearance of wrought iron. Tip: If you use darker colours on the endges and lighter colours towards the centre of a space, that space will appear more rounded or dimensional.

I then used a couple of shades of green for the foliage.

I used bright red for the flowers with splashes of orange in between. I love the sharp contrast of red and green. These two colours are opposite each other on the colour wheel and are therefore known as complimentary colours.

I added greys to the cement slab in front of the door. I then very loosely added scribbles of various muted colours to the windows, that I spread randomly across the spaces, to create the illusion of reflecting glass.

With one page done, I turned my attention to the next page. I found the journaling to be very detailed, requiring some precision work that would best be done with fineliners. I therefore treated only the journaling on the page with Clear gesso, using a small round brush to paint the gesso onto the lettering.

The palette I used was restricted to the one I used on the previous page; brown, green, red, pink, orange and yellow.

A friend and colleague had recently given me a clear sticker sheet that was left over from a crafting project she had done with her church group. I cut some of the stickers out from this sheet to use on my page.

Being clear stickers, they looked beautiful on the page and put just the right finishing touches on the project.

The completed layout.

You can watch a short compilation video of the steps above on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/sXD1ql3pAIA

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2005,2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois, 60188. All rights reserved.

Inspire PRAISE South Africa edition copyright 2017 by Christian Art Publishers, PO Box 1599, Vereeniging, 1930, RSA. All rights reserved.

Marietjie Uys (Miekie) is a published author. You can buy my books here:
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