Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Alknock, artist and Bible journalist, and today I'm inspired by some berries I saw on a recent walk with my dogs. And I decided to try painting them in my Bible journey made simple workbook and try it in my Bible as well. So I'm going to show you how I painted this. And the verse that I chose for this particular one is from one of the Psalms. You gave abundant showers, oh God, you refreshed your weary inheritance, your people settled in it, and from your bounty God you provided for the poor. And I'll tell you later why I chose that verse, but I'm going to get into the painting of the picture or at least the drawing of the picture first. And what I did was just draw circle berries. And don't worry about making them perfect and having a template or anything, you could just draw general circles because this is going to be really loose. And then in between, I took my pencil, yes that is a pencil, it's a fancy mechanical pencil, you can use a number two pencil. And I'm just drawing some kind of general leaf shapes in there. I'm not worried about making it look like those leaves. I'm just making it look like scrubby stuff in between. And the only reason that I'm drawing this at all is to give myself a little bit of a guideline later when I start putting some shadow colors in. And then I'm putting in a few lines to each of the berries to remind myself that I can add some stems to them. And then I'll be ready to start my painting. So this is a super easy sketch to create. I put a piece of paper underneath so I don't dribble paint down the side of my Bible and then start in on the painting. And for the berries, I'm making them look like they have highlights on them by just dropping color in there but leaving some white spots. I'm leaving them consistently in kind of the top right hand quadrant of each of the berries but I'm not making them look like they're the same. Doesn't really matter a whole lot. This is very loose. And then I'm going to go in with green while this is wet and I'm going to touch some of the parts of the berries. I want the color to bleed and I know that probably sets a lot of people off and they don't know what to do because it's bleeding. It's alright. If some of the red gets into your greens, it's okay. And also remember this is your Bible. It doesn't really something that you're going to hang on the wall that everybody's going to look at and critique you. It's a really fun exercise to try. And if you have my Bible journey made simple workbook, you can try it in there first and see how it works. So I'm going in and adding just greens around each one of the reds and I'll continue on down the rest of the page. But I wanted to tell you kind of the excitement about why I chose this verse. And that is that my book is kind of settled. I am now with Penguin Random House instead of with the previous publisher. They went into chapter 11 bankruptcy and I don't remember if I told you guys here on YouTube that it finally got at least settled. My portion of it got settled for many, many months. I was in limbo wondering what was going to happen to my books and were they going to continue to be published where people are going to still be able to get them. And finally, a few months ago, I got to notice that I would be now with Penguin Random House. So that was such a blessing to have that settle. And the reason that I chose this verse was the last portion of it in particular that it says that God you provided for the poor because these books are not something I'm making anything off of. Just want you to know that I am not making money on the sale of the books. I am donating all of that money to help the poor because I had this agreement with God with this book. I did not want to feel like I was I was hawking a book in order to make money and I was just going to donate it away. So when the book, when the company went into bankruptcy, I wasn't worried about me and a lot of people were. I was not concerned about that because I was not counting on any of that income. I do have Bible journaling classes that I do and those I get some income from, they are discounted nicely so that they don't put up a barrier between people learning and that sort of thing. But the books are not a place where I ever intended to make money. So it was really a blessing to know that God was providing for the poor by keeping my book with another company and keeping this going. So I hope you can feel good about your book that you've purchased or if you want to purchase one, there's of course the link in the do we do to the Bible journaling made simple.com page that has links to all the places that you can go and buy the books. So now I got through the first pass and while it's still wet, I'm adding more color. And I'm adding more color by just going in with less water on my brush to pick up paint and that means I'm going to have more pigment and less water and it's going to end up being a little more contrasty. And the places where I'm adding it are random. I'm not trying to paint into any of those leaf shapes that I painted because I kept them deliberately sketchy so I couldn't fill them in. And I'm going into a few areas to create little stems and some areas I'm just adding darker pigment. And some of the stems can be in this layer because I'm going to also add more color in another layer that's going to deepen everything even further. If you're satisfied when you get to this point and you're afraid to go further than by all means, you can do that. I decided to try something here and this is where I'm just kind of playing around. I went for an Aussie red gold color which is kind of an orangey yellow to see what would happen if I added that into my berries. Would that be a color that I was going to like? And it wasn't really all that much working for me. I wanted something darker. But at this point I had enough moisture on the page that I put a piece of paper over top and underneath and ironed the page so it would flatten out a little more and make it easier to work with. Now if you put that paper over and you iron it while it is still really, really wet, then the color is going to lighten because all that color is going to transfer onto the paper. If you want to retain the depth of color you've already got, wait for it to dry first and then you can iron it and it will certainly work better. So now I'm adding a darker red to it. I have a dark perilline maroon color in my palette that I really like and I decided to add that in there and it was much, much more pleasing to me to have those strong red berries that I had seen in the dog walk that I had done and then I mixed up a dark green because I now wanted more contrast in leaves and trying to get those to have a little more depth in them to match the depth that I now had in the berries. But I'm going to put less of this dark green in and have less areas of that covered so that some of the lighter colors will come through and I get a, not necessarily a balance but I get a really good mix of dark and light colors in here. So I want some of the lighter stuff from underneath to show and I can choose which areas that I want to add in, maybe a little shadow underneath an edge of a leaf that I've drawn in because I can still see my pencil lines even if you can't and just sort of blend them out, let them blend into each other. I can let some of them blend into the new red color that I've put in and really make it as detailed as I want but I'm going to try to not get too detailed because that's not what this painting is about. It is about reminding me of the bounty that I have and the bounty that God has given me to provide for others. So in the settling of where my book is going to be at now that I now have a new publisher that God has done something beautiful. He has brought abundance into not just my life but into those who are going to benefit from the donations that are made from the sale of the books. So I'm really excited to have that settled and this is a good way to celebrate that. I may celebrate that more because every time I get one of those little royalty checks and I get to go and donate that out, I will be reminded of God's blessing and how he's given to me so that I can give to others and he does that with all of us too. So here I decided I wanted a softer edge going out into the text so I painted some sort of leaf shapes out there but then I just softened them up with the baby white so that they blend out lightly and of course retain the readability of the verse. And once it was all done and I had it looked just gorgeous. I have room for some journaling on the right hand side in that right hand column that I might add but for now that is all I have for you in today's video. Hope you enjoyed this if you did click that like button and I hope you will try painting some berries in your Bible. Maybe talk about a story that you feel grateful for God's provision. I'll see you guys again next week. Bye bye.