Well, hi there. I'm Sandy Allnock, artist and Bible journalist here on YouTube. And I'm going to be celebrating World Watercolor Month all month long with watercoloring in my Bible. And I hope you'll join me. Try some yourself. The technique for today is really easy and it's going to hopefully open you up to trying some watercolour in your Bible. I'm journaling in Deuteronomy chapter 1, verse 13, to some wise understanding and respected men slash women from each of your tribes and I will set them over you. And in this particular passage, this whole section of Scripture, Moses is talking to the people about, hey, God said he was going to make you fruitful, multiply you like the stars in the sky and you've become a burden. You've become too much for me. Can anybody identify with that, right? And he talks about how God wants him to appoint leaders and wanted him to give other people some of that authority so that they can help adjudicate the claims that the people have and run things. And he started passing on that authority. When I was reading a devotional that had this passage in it, I was really thinking about how he was choosing from those stars in the sky. This was picking from the abundance that God had given him to choose the leaders that he chose. And by extension, when he chooses us to be in leadership of some sort, he's choosing us as stars in the sky. And I hadn't really thought about myself as a star. Like that was kind of a really neat idea that I wanted to get into my Bible. So what I'm doing is using a bunch of different paint colors to make a galaxy. And I'm going to do a galaxy background over the whole page. And don't worry, you might look weird like you can't read it right now, but it's going to be readable. Don't stress. I am using paints that are a little less transparent than my normal Daniel Smith paints, but that's okay because I'm going to move the color to be so thin over this and so transparent that it's going to be like using some of the more expensive, more transparent watercolors. So if all you have is just regular watercolors like these that tend to get a little bit thicker, then I'll show you in just a minute how to thin them out a little bit. So what I've done is taken the yellow over the verse because of course yellow is always my favorite color. And that'd be a really light color. And then moved out from there through the reds, the pinks, the purples, then to the blues on the outside. And I want the column on the right hand side to be really dark. So I'm going to put some really dark colors over there because I'm not covering any scripture text. So it can be as dark as I want it to be. And I'm just kind of randomly picking colors here. Notice that I'm not stressing out over, oh my goodness, a rainbow has to be a certain progression of colors. You can do whatever you want. If you look at photographs, those really intense, beautiful photographs that they can take of outer space, you can actually see all kinds of colors going through the galaxies and stuff. They're really gorgeous. And don't worry about trying to make all these colors blend perfectly because what I'm going to do in just a minute here is going to make everything work. But I wanted lots of color down here first. This is best done while this is good and wet. But if you wait till it dries, you can still move color a little bit more. But not a whole lot. So what I'm going to do is grab a baby wipe. And notice that I also have a sheet of paper under my page because I want the page to not bleed down or the paint, paint not to bleed down the side of my Bible. But I'm taking the baby wipe and I'm just going to move it around, tap it on some of the places where I just want to lighten. You can also just rub it to really pull color over. If you put too much down, you can usually just move it gently across the surface. But I'm not stressing out about trying to make everything blended. It's just kind of going to make these cloudy sorts of shapes by just tapping on here. And hang tight. It's going to look gorgeous. I know it. It tends to look like a hot mess until it doesn't. That's how my work goes. And then I'm taking a hot iron and I'm just going to iron across the surface really quick with a piece of paper on top. Now if your paint is still really, really wet, then your piece of paper is going to pick up some of that color. So I usually try to make sure it's good and dry first. I don't heat set in my Bible. I don't want to wrinkle the entire Bible up. Just let it air dry. And then do the ironing. And now I'm going to add another layer of color. Look how light that color got when I had all that rich color. And you were probably worried. I know some of you were worried. But it came out really light. And now I can really make the color on the outside edges much richer. And with these slightly more opaque watercolors, it's a lot easier to get that richness of color on the outside. That's one of the reasons I chose to use these paints for this particular technique. Because I wanted to have that dark sky on that right edge. The trick will be in trying to make sure you smooth out the place where the dark goes into the light and it starts to kind of go over the text because you don't want to increase so much over there that you end up messing up the text that's there. But I'm going to get a fresh baby wipe. And go along the edges, the fresh baby wipe is going to not put down extra color. And if you're trying to lighten, then make sure you're using a clean side of the baby wipe. Pardon me, I got frogs in my throat today. So tapping along here, trying to even out some of the areas that might be too much. But I really love all this texture. It looks galactic. And it's really fun. So after getting that second layer to look like you want, you can do a third layer and a fourth layer. Just go through the same process of ironing first. And that sort of thing. I'm going to brighten up the color before I do my ironing on the verse that I'm using as my focal verse. And even put a little bit more bright color. Mixing from the yellow to the purple. This is optional because I know some people will start to freak out as it starts to get richer and deeper on their Bible. At the end, I'll show you. It doesn't bleed through the only place that I'm getting any bleeding when doing something with quite this much paint is just around the edges. And you'll see how that works out. It's not a bother something to me. But I will flip through and show you the back of it in just a few minutes. Give it another quick iron and get that nice and flattened out. Sometimes you'll need to iron the backside as well if you have a lot of water in there. It really came out gorgeous. All of this beautiful texture and color and everything. Now I'm taking a little tile that I use as a palette and I squeezed out some white acrylic paint. And I've got an old toothbrush. I have an electric toothbrush that I use but my dentist always gives me toothbrushes. So I keep some for travel but I keep some for painting with. And this is acrylic paint and I'm just going to flick it on here. You could use a white gel pen to make all the little stars but it's kind of fun to make these super teeny tiny ones and make it really feel super galactic because they're so small. And it'll also give you some that are bigger, a little bit bigger chunks and you can do these kind of stars right over top of the text because you can still read them. And I also decided just for fun to use a different color acrylic. These don't have to be special acrylic paints. If you're going to do a whole background in them you want to make sure that it's something you could actually do this same technique with. Just use them watered down and spread that color out so you could still read the scriptures. But I'm going to use a little bit of that light blue green color to add a little bit more color to this as well and brighten that up. Which is really kind of fun. You could do all kinds of colors and just do that with pinks and purples and blues and things. And then I thought I'd add a few direct stars in some places where I wasn't able to control all that spray from the toothbrush. So that was kind of fun to add. That in the white pen. You can see my finger is still blue from all of that paint. But the verse that I decided to, or the words I decided to write out here, I thought I would capture the wonder that I had when I read this verse and started thinking about being a star. Because that was just such a beautiful and wide eyed sort of moment for me that when God said he was going to multiply us like the stars of the sky, we are what has been multiplied. That's us. So I put, I've been appointed like a star and I had one of my blobs there. I ended up actually flicking off a little bit of it later because it was really thick paint and use that star as one of the things right inside the text there so that my words go around it and just flicked off part of it so it wasn't quite as a globby of a star in the long run. So here is the flipping to the back side. You can see it only went around the corners up there and that's all that I get when I end up doing something that's so heavy in watercolor. But look how gorgeous that galactic sky is. Isn't that fun? I hope you'll try something like this and that you'll join me for World Watercolor Month as well. And the Facebook group, we're sharing different things that people are doing each day. You don't have to do every day and you don't have to do a whole Bible journaling page. The prompts were right there on the screen. They're also going to be in a link in the description and you can pick that up also in the Facebook group. And I will see you guys again next week with more watercolor. Hope you try some of this yourself and God bless you very much. Bye bye.