Hi there, it's Sandy Olmock, Bible Journaler here on YouTube, and today I am going to be painting in Psalm 73. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Sometimes it's a little challenging to explain where my ideas come from, because as I'm praying through the day about whatever scripture the Lord has had me reading in the morning, I come up with some rather strange things, and as I meditate in particularly on this verse that just stuck in my heart, I really wanted to find a way to tell the Lord and make sure he got the message. Not that I think he doesn't hear me, but to send my thanks to him. Like physically, if I could throw a paper airplane high enough in the sky to get all the way to heaven, and I saw a kite, I saw kids and a kite. But you know if I had a kite that was really tall string that would be great, so I decided to draw myself flying kite. But I had to make me really small down at the bottom, and instead of making a person the way I normally would with the dress kind of coming up to the neck, the dress would be a little shortened. It would almost be like the neck is higher up on the head in order to make it look like the little person is looking upward, and that you're looking down from heaven. And then I drew the little feet sticking out from under the dress, the arms coming around, and then the face is higher up on the oval of the face than you would normally draw it. It's normally the eyes are kind of in the middle of the head, you just need to be a little higher up in order for it to look like the person is looking upward. Then the paints. I wanted to mix a color that would be perfect for this background because the light green that I have in my palette is what's called a granulating color. It's a color that breaks out into several colors. As you use it, it's got a texture, and I want it something a little smoother this time. So I mixed a light blue and a light yellow. You can mix whatever color you want out of the colors that are in your watercolor palette. You don't have to use what is provided. And I'm just going to do the whole background in this really soft, soft green. This will keep the whole page readable, but I can also add other things to it, and I've got this really nice soft green, and I'm only going to leave the kite and the face open. The part that's going to be on the top of this, I have this picture in my head of having a half pink half red heart, because I've got two reds, a red and a pink in my palette. And after I dried the first half of it, I painted the second one on so I can have a little division between the two colors. A note that a kite is really just a diamond with a cross in the middle of it, and I made my edges a little bit curved. That's all kites are real easy to draw. And then filled in some color on the dress and the hair. And then I had this vision when I was doing this of how to make it look like the person was way down below, which was to put the kite's shadow down on the ground. So it has to be much smaller and in basically the same shape. And it's the kite casting its shadow right over me, which is, God keeping me safe in the shadow of his wings and under his heart, which is the heart that's on my kite. I even painted the face dark because now the face is in shadow. All of that is unimportant. What's important is the message for God. And that's the part that's going to stay bright. I wanted the kite to look white though. The kite wasn't looking very white, so I put darker color. Now I could have put all kinds of colors back there, but I decided to make it a little forest in the background. So I'm standing on it. The heel side is what I'm picturing. And that suddenly makes the white of the kite pop because I've got this nice angled thing going on. It's got some movement on the page, which was nice. Next step was to iron it nice and flat, of course, and then start doing my drawing. I took my micron pen and outlined the kite, made a few puckers on the corners, and then started tracing the lines of my little person. I always do the line work after the painting because otherwise, then I have to worry about whether my brush is going to stay within the lines of whatever I've drawn. And it's all easier to make your lines go around and fix where the painting fell short. Then it is to go the opposite direction I find. So I keep the little person very simple. I don't do people very well, so I always try, if I can, to make them like really glorified stick figures if anything. The tails of the kite, you could include or you could just leave them off. You could make them just riddance or you could make them string as like I've got going. And I'm going to put those little bows. Like I used to do when I was a kid. I have no idea if anybody actually puts bows like this on kite tails. Like kids who I saw flying a kite, I just saw something fluttering off the edge. Didn't necessarily see anything there to follow along for my painting. I added a little shadow within a shadow behind my little self. And then I started going a little bit off the rails. I wanted to make my kite look like it was sort of bent in the middle. You know how it kites? So you can see all four sides of it. And I was trying to make some sides gray so that part of it would be in the sun and then part of it would be tilted the other way. And this is one of the good things about watercolors that it dries back so light. Because not only can I add water to it to soften the color, but I can also take a baby wipe and wipe some back off. And then when it dries, it's also going to be lighter. I can do other things and I'll do some contrast work here as well to fix this. Now that I've got this sort of gray kite, I wanted it to feel a little bit brighter. So I repainted over the hearts, the strong red on the right side and the strong pink on the left side. And this time I did them touching wet on wet so the colors can mix a little bit. Not going to hurt anything if it does. Get them to blend nicely. And then I added a little bit of the puckers, which is really what I should have done the first time, adding a little bit of the puckers on the corners of the kite. And then after that was dry, I added in another layer of dark so it looks like there's a forest off on the background behind the kite. And then the kite started looking white again because it had dark colors surrounding it. And my final step was to add the wording. You are the strength of my heart. And that is my message being sent, heavenward. So grateful that God gives us His strength because our strength is certainly not enough. I don't know about you. I am about out of strength right now with everything that our world is going through. At least what America is going through, the world seems to be doing better. We're struggling here, but God is still the strength of our heart, no matter what. And I'm grateful to Him for that. So thank you so much for visiting with me again today. And I will see you again next Sunday with another video. Take care. Bye bye.