If you are anything like me, you probably hate when you make mistakes in your journaling Bible. I think it is also a common fear that holds back new Bible journalers from jumping in; because you don’t want to mess up in the pretty Bible! 
I’ve been there! Even after years of Bible journaling, I still make mistakes ALL THE TIME! It happens! Thankfully, I have learned a few ways to cover up or fix those mistakes. So I’m going to share with you three of my favorite fixes.
1. For Small Mess-Ups Use A White Gel Pen
A white gel pen is one of my favorite tools for Bible journaling. It is great for adding highlights or little details; but also wonderful at covering up small mess-ups like paint smudges or stray lines.
On this page, for example, I accidentally smudged a few of my orange dots, as well as messed up the gold shadow on the “d”.
So, to fix this, I took my white gel pen (my favorite white pen is the Sakura Decorese pen – affiliate link) and just dabbed it over the parts I wanted to erase. I find that dabbing the pen in little dots, rather than rolling it normally, works better. If the paint or ink that I am trying to cover up is especially dark, I sometimes have to do a few layers with my white pen, letting them dry in-between.
And, wa-la, if you really look closely you can still see the white pen, but it looks much better than the smudges!
2. For Medium Sized Mistakes, Cover It Up With Washi Tape and/or Stickers
Washi tape is a great tool for Bible journalers. If you are not familiar with it, it is basically a fancy masking tape that comes in all types of colors and designs.
For this next page, I got distracted when writing “anxious” and forgot the “x”! GOSH DARN IT!
But instead of freaking out, I found some washi that matched the flowers I had on my page and slapped it over my messed up word. (The washi also magically fit the height of my word perfectly, but of course, I would have added extra tape if needed to cover the word fully).
Then, since washi tape is hard to write on directly, I used letter stickers to spell out “anxious”- correctly this time. 😉
I also decided to use the washi to make a tab at the top to tie it into my page. DONE!
3. For Big Mistakes or Bleed-Through, Use Acrylic Paints
Oh, that dreaded bleed-through. Sometimes you just can’t get away from it. After my couple years of Bible journaling, I find I rarely have bleed-through now, but it still happens! I also often find myself running across bleed-through from old entries I did when first starting out (it’s all about that trial and error!) Which is what happened with this page.
I made this page the first month I started bible journaling and never went to do the back side of the page until just lately; and I realized there was a bunch of bleed-through.
My favorite way to cover this bleed-through up is by painting over it with acrylic paints. Acrylics used to intimidate me because I thought that they would make my page heavy, cover too much, and are too difficult to use. But actually, acrylics work really well with Bible journaling.
The key thing to note here though is that to make sure I keep the integrity of my original page, I always prep the page I’m working on (the backside of the original page) with gesso. This just gives me extra assurance that no funky business will go on. If you don’t know what gesso is, or how to prep your page with it, see my post here.
After preparing my page, and letting that dry, I simply brush on the acrylic paint over the bleed through in a pretty thin layer. Here I used purple. Then I dressed it up with some simple swipes in different colors, added some crosses and dots, and did some lettering (I used the same Sakura gel pen mentioned above to do the highlights for the lettering)
And almost like magic, you would never know that there was any bleed-through, and my original page stayed exactly the same!
I have a video showing how I did these fixes below!
Did this post give you new ideas for fixing mistakes? Or do you have another way of covering up boo-boos? Let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you!
