All Day Long

From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised! 

Psalm 113:3

Hi Friends!
Psalm 113 is a psalm of praise. It starts and ends with "Praise the Lord!" It speaks to the fact that there is no one like our God, and that He raises the lowly and broken and gives them what they need. Verse 3 says from the rising to the setting of the sun God be praised- so all day long. So I had to ask myself, am I praising Him all day long? Uuuhhh, noooo. Sometimes I praise Him, if I think about it. That's the problem isn't it, we get so busy that outside church or our daily study, prayer, or journaling time, we can forget to be praising Him. So my goal is that when I'm going about my daily routine, I'm taking time to praise Him. I'll set myself reminders on my phone at first. It sounds silly, I know, but this will help it to become routine. He's worthy of all day long praises!

Page Details:
This post is a little different than my normal posts as I'm going to spend a little more time explaining the design of my page. Because the verse says "from the rising of the sun to its setting", I knew I wanted a sun on my page. I've done suns before on pages, and wanted to do something a little different. I decided I wanted a mosaic look. I searched "mosaic sun pattern" online and was inspired by the images. My first step of the page was drawing the horizon with a pencil. I then drew lines along the ground that I wanted to paint different colors.

I'm not the best with acrylic paints, but I do ok. So know up front, it's ok if it's not perfect! With a sponge brush, I applied blue and black acrylic paint to my page for the sky. I let them blend with my brush strokes adding more blue as I went. Then with the black, I outlined the horizon and the lines for the ground.

Then I took a variety of paint colors to paint the ground. In each section, I started with the darker color, and then would blend in the lighter color with my brush.

Finally, I used a square brush to paint the circle of the sun. Then using the same brush, I made the sun's rays using yellow, white, greens and blues. I dipped my brush into different combinations of the colors to get slightly different hues. I started with yellow and white, then yellow and light green, then light green and blue, darker green and lighter green, etc.

I used a heat gun to dry the paint. I've found if acrylic paint is not completely dry and you stamp on it, the stamp can actually pull the paint off the page. So it's important to make sure it's dry before stamping! I used the Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps set called Women of Praise. This set is one of my favorite sets!

I used Archival ink to stamp on top of the paint. Again, from experience, I've found that other inks tend to bleed- they don't stay crisp on top of acrylic paint. Archival doesn't bleed into the paint. I wanted the words to kind of blend into the sky, but also wanted your eye to be drawn to them. So my last step was using a white pen to highlight the words.

I hope this helped! If you haven't tried acrylic paints in your Bible, I hope you'll try them! They don't bleed through and actually protect the backside of the page from bleedthrough.

Have a blessed week, my friends, and Praise the Lord! Andrea