The Bible is filled with great mountain imagery and visuals. Which is wonderful, because I love painting and Bible journaling mountains.
Today’s tutorial is easy, fun, and beautifully simple. I’ll show you how to create a monochrome (aka. monochromatic, aka. “one color”) mountain scene using acrylics.
To paint these mountains all you need is three colors of acrylic paint: a dark color of your choosing (I chose navy, but you could also do green, brown, black, red, dark pink, etc.), white, and black. You’ll also need a small flat paintbrush and a small round paintbrush.
Basically, you are going to use your base color, and add varying amounts of white to create multiple shades of the same color. I did four tones, but you can choose to do more or less! Then, you start painting the layers of mountains; starting with the lightest color at the top to the darkest color at the bottom. If you’d like to finish it with a forest on the bottom like I did, you’ll use the black to paint on some trees. See the video below for more on exactly how to do it!
A few important things to note:
-I used my interleaved Bible (A journaling Bible that has full blank pages on every other page) to create my Bible journaling page, but you can definitely scale this down to fit just the margins of a normal Journaling Bible (picture below). Alternatively, you can paint this on a separate sheet of paper and create a tip-in out of it, or simply paint it on any surface that you prefer outside of a Bible.
– I always get asked if I prepare my Bible pages beforehand (with gesso), and no I don’t! Acrylics never bleed through, and they act like page prep, so it is generally safe to use markers/inks that do bleed-through on top of them, such as the UniPosca paint pens I used for my page. *I also have never had bleed-through with a journaling Bible and the watercolors I use either. Click here for more information on my favorite supplies that do not bleed.*
– Technically, you can do this same technique with watercolors by varying the amount of water used to create the different shades of colors. I recommend starting from the bottom-up, rather than top-down, and make sure each mountain layer is completely dry. You wouldn’t allow for overlap of the layers like you can with acrylics.
Materials Used
ESV Interleaved Journaling Bible
Apple Barrel Acrylic Paints (Any acrylic paints work)
Uni-Posca Extra Fine White Paint Pen
1/4″ Flat paintbrush, and small size 8 paintbrush
Helpful Links
Faux Calligraphy Tutorial- Plus Free Printable
