Bible Journaling with Kids: Getting Started

For a long, long time I’ve gotten pictures in my head when I read.  I see scenes, characters, clothes, or whatever’s being described well – so when my dad took me to Bible study as a kid, one of the first pictures I ‘saw’ was of Pharaoh with a frog happily perched atop his head. For the past year or so, I’ve been drawing out those pictures.  Sometimes it’s a complete picture, like the froggy and the Pharaoh, but more often than not it’s a mixture of words, colors, and letters.  It’s enough to give me something creative to do with my hands while I ponder the scripture and pray through it. The kids have been watching this process, and now they’re interested in Bible journaling, too.  We’ve done several things with it:  we’ve talked about how to draw and highlight scripture in their Bibles so that they can interact with it while still keeping the text legible.  We’ve also purchased simple sketchbooks so that they can make separate pieces of art in there. At first, we journaled together.  We began during Advent and journaled our way through the Christmas story.  After reading the scripture for the day, we read the notes in my study Bible, talked about what specific words meant, about relevant customs of the day, or anything else that popped up. Then we broke out our supplies and got to work. We still journal in this way at least once each week.  We really enjoy the time spent together in scripture, and the artistic endeavor is relaxing.  While we don’t stress about the ‘professionalism’ of the finished product, it is fun to pull out all sorts of art supplies and get colorful.  Sometimes it’s all about the background, others it’s the lettering or a picture, but always it’s about the Bible. So what do we use?  You don’t need anything special.  You probably already have art supplies around the house that will do really cool things.  It is fun, though, to have materials that do new-to-you, special, or unusual things.  With that in mind, these are our very favorite supplies to share among us – and why. These simple Crayola Twistable Crayons – not the pencils – are hands-down my favorite new thing.  I wish I had known about these years ago.  They’re perfect for adults AND for kids for several reasons:  they apply very smoothly to the paper.  That makes them easy to blend to achieve a variety of shades easily.  More importantly, though, you can get great color on the paper and still read the text behind it.  That makes these Twistables perfect for drawing or highlighting in your Bible.  You can sketch in a picture and still be able to read the scripture that inspired the art.  Colored pencils are a basic thing, but you can do great things with them.  My favorite is to color in words that I’ve bubbled or to add shadows or highlights to words.  They’re not too expensive, easy to erase, and easy to sharpen.  Now, to get a little fancier … I’ve always thought of Sharpies as indelible – and they might be, on your clothing or on plastic, but most Sharpies are not waterproof.  This kind, though, IS.  That means that you can use it to outline a drawing, do some creative lettering, and also use in the same piece of art …. Waterpaint.  Waterpaints in the little tubes are a blast to use because you can control the shading and the amount of pigment much more easily than you can the little cakes of color in the plastic trays.  Those will certainly work; but if you’re going to splurge on supplies, the tubes are very fun and they make kids feel as if their artwork and their thoughts are extra important. Gellyroll Glaze pens are new to use, but we’re having a lot of fun exploring with them.  You can use these special, sparkly pens by themselves and enjoy the ink colors, or you can use them (again with the waterpaints) to make a resist.  Basically, you write or draw whatever you want, and when it’s dry, you paint right over top of the whole thing.  The glaze ink pushes the water out of the way, making the ink stand out.  My kids consider this to be almost a ‘secret message’ kind of ink, and they love using it in their Bible art.  (If you’re going to do resists, then white is the most fun color to have.) We keep all of these special supplies in a basket with our Bible and journals, so that we can easily grab it and get to work. Do you journal scripture with your kids?  Want more?  Hop over here to find Six Ways to Turn Scripture into Art. Shared at: