Celebrating 250 Years of 'Amazing Grace' with a Coloring Page Inspired by Stained Glass

This year marks 250 years since the hymn Amazing Grace was written. It's one of my favorites (although for some reason I didn't include it in this list of my faves) and I think a lot of Christians would include it on their list of favorites. A quick search of "most popular hymns" confirmed this for me. Open the Bible lists 'Amazing Grace' as #1 of the 25 most popular Christian hymns. GodTube also places it at #1, as does Music Grotto and a bunch of other sites. In fact, every link I opened had it within the top 3 of all time. 

Our church is starting a multi-week study of Amazing Grace for our Adult Forum. That inspired me to make a simple coloring page to go along with the lessons. I made and printed the page last week, but I didn't color it until Saturday, when my grief about losing Trouble made it impossible to do anything else.

I hadn't imagined anything nearly so detailed when I designed the coloring page.

But it felt right. Coloring soothed me as I grieved. What would have ordinarily felt ridiculously tedious was instead comforting. 

I colored the cross first, using two Ohuhu Honolulu markers to make the wood grain. 

I wanted to make the background look like stained glass, so I drew some light guidelines below the horizon and colored in that section with six shades of green. I liked it, but decided to do the top section with smaller blocks of color. I added a bunch of guidelines that were much closer together than the others, then added diagonal lines to mimic the panels of stained glass. I didn't measure any of this (which you can tell in the finished product); I just went with what I felt at the time. 

I imagined a warm, comforting glow behind the cross, so that's what I colored next. I used six shades of yellow and orange Honolulus. 

After finishing the sky (6 more shades of Honolulus), I didn't like how blocky the grass area looked, so I went back in and tried to create smaller blocks out of what was already there. It didn't work with the darkest green, but I was able to break up the other blocks.  

The final step was mimicking the lead lines in the stained glass. I used a medium grey marker for that.  

I learned a lot from coloring this page. First, and most important, is that coloring can be incredibly beneficial during difficult times, especially coloring an inspirational image that feels comforting. My other lessons were less profound. Among them, when I don't feel like measuring something that really should be measured, I can use the computer to do it for me. It would have taken less time to add the guidelines digitally and reprint my coloring page than it did for me to draw them by hand, and the results would have been significantly better. With that in mind, I'll be creating a new version of my coloring page with the guidelines in place.