When you pray, where do you go?

A lot of times people go to a quiet place like their bedroom, or some place where they could think about what they want to pray about.

One time, Joseph Smith went to a quiet place in a grove of trees to ask Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ some questions. And they appeared to him in a pillar of light. And they gave him a work to do to bring forth the Book of Mormon. And they called him to be a prophet of God.

And so today, because of this experience, we have the Book of Mormon. So I thought it would be a lot of fun to draw a picture of grove of trees with a pillar of light.

I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Let's go draw.

[CHEERFUL MUSIC PLAYING]

So let’s go ahead and start drawing the Sacred Grove.

We're going to draw a bunch of trees,

but at first I'm going to draw a big tree right here in the front. And then we'll do some of the other stuff later.

And so to do that, I’m going to go

close to the top of my page, maybe a little over halfway.

And I'm going to start creating a big bushy tree.

You could draw a circle here, or you could try to give it some leaves if you want to.

And I'm going to start right here, and I'm going to go all the way over

and probably come out about right up here. So halfway through the page or maybe a little over halfway.

And so you could draw a circle if you want a circle tree or you could put waves on it. But these are the leaves on the tree.

We're just going to go up like that,

and then we're going to draw the trunk of this tree.

And to do that, I'm just going to draw a straight line down.

Wherever you want doesn't have to be perfect because tree trunks aren't perfect.

And we could draw a branch coming up from it.

So we've got one tree right there, and maybe you want to even put some ground on here or some grass to go all the way across. And then we're going to do the rest of the trees back here. But at first I want to draw a pillar of light coming down through the trees.

And you can draw this straight up and down. Maybe you can curve it out if you want to. But I’m going to put it coming out from underneath this tree a little bit.

I'm going to go all the way to the ground,

and then I'm going to do another one from the top,

all the way down to the ground. So you can see that right there.

So after we get this beam here, let's draw another tree up here. But we're going to draw just the leaves up here.

And you can do the same thing. You can put a dot here and here if that helps you. So you know where you want your leaves to go. So we have two trees here. We have this light. Now let's draw this tree that goes behind this light here.

And we’re going to draw right through our beam of light, or pillar of light.

So I'm just going to draw another tree canopy, whatever shape you like.

You can see how that goes right behind it.

And now we can draw the trunk of this tree. And I think it would be really fun if we draw part of it in the light and part of it out, and you'll see why when we start coloring it.

So I'm going to draw the trunk of my tree coming down to the ground here.

And then I'm going to go outside of it and I'm going to go up maybe draw a branch that goes over.

Just like that.

Now, the Sacred Grove has a lot of trees in it, so I'm going to do a whole bunch of trees in the background, but I'm not going to draw any of them inside of this light right here. So you can see right here, I'm going to do just the bottoms of the canopies of the trees.

And you can overlap these wherever you want. But when you get to this light, just stop right there.

And once you do one row of those going all the way across.

You can put some trees coming down or some trunks of trees coming down.

From those canopies.

And then to make it look like there’s some trees that are even further away, we could even do that again if we want to. So you could draw some more

canopies, and those trees will look like they’re much, much further away.

And we could draw some lines coming down from those ones as well.

Where have you like them?

You could even do some other little lines to look like there's really far away trees. All right, so now that we have this peaceful grove done,

let's go ahead and start coloring it.

And I want to do something kind of fun here. And we’re going to make these front trees a lot darker, like they’re in shadow. And that just makes the light look all the brighter.

So, the first thing I’m going to do is I want to get some purple, and I'm just going to go around the edges of this tree

and I'll show you why in a minute. So you could just draw some lines, kind of like the shape of your tree.

And just do them along the side that's facing this light.

And then just fill that in with this pretty purple color.

The interesting thing about light is it can make things look like all different kinds of colors that they might not look like with the sun out.

And then let's go over and we'll do this tree, because I want this one to be really close to us too.

We don't see the trunk of it is probably over here off the page somewhere. We’re going to fill that in nice and purple.

And then I'm going to go across the trunk of the tree, the front of it right here. We'll put some purple there.

And then maybe we’ll do some right there too, like that. And that looks kind of neat, right? All right. So now if you have a black marker, grab that one. Or a really, really dark blue, something even darker than this purple because we're going to make all of this be on the opposite side of this light coming through the trees.

So I’m going to fill the rest of this in with black.

And then it'll look like

the light is at the other side of this tree

and it’ll create a really neat effect.

And while you're coloring this, you can think about the experience that Joseph Smith had.

He went to a quiet place like this, like this grove of trees.

He possibly wanted to be alone so that he could think about what he wanted to pray about.

And while he was there, he saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, and they came down in a pillar of light.

And they talked to him and they prepared Joseph Smith to be able to

translate the Book of Mormon.

And that’s the work that They had for him to do, so that we could have the Book of Mormon today.

And he was also called to be a prophet of God, to teach us.

Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to color the trunk of this tree.

So anywhere where I didn’t color purple on these two trees,

I'm going to do this black. And then you could do that across the ground a little bit too, if you want to so you can see where the ground’s at. All right. So once you have these shadows all colored in, we're going to start working on some of this light.

And this light might even represent how

light helps us see things in the darkness. Just like when the Book of Mormon came and Joseph Smith saw God the Father and Jesus Christ, it brought a lot of light into our lives,

because it brings knowledge and things that we wouldn’t know otherwise.

So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to just get a yellow color. And I'm going to color everywhere that this tree is not at. So just this part in here. I don't want to color the trunk of the tree.

If you do, that's okay because it's really easy to color over the color yellow with a marker.

And then after you get that color in, find maybe your lightest, lightest brown color or maybe a really light orange color, and we're just going to color the side of the trunk of the tree that's in the light. Because light makes things light up,

it makes it brighter so we can see things.

Just like the coming forth of the Book of Mormon helped us to see things.

And then find your lightest green color.

And we're going to use that to color all the parts of this tree that are in our pillar of light.

This is already looking pretty neat.

Okay.

And then last of all, so now that we have this lighter green color, for the canopies of these trees, let’s use a darker green color.

So I’m going to grab this one right here, I’m going to do that for

all the trees that are back here.

So we’ve got this one and you can go across all of them. If you need to pause the video, you can if I’m going too quickly for you. And if you want to, you can color the trees different colors.

You don't have to do this exactly like mine.

I know that everybody’s picture is going to look different.

And we can all imagine the way it was in our minds, and we can think about what this amazing experience Joseph Smith had could have been like, to be able to see Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ

so that we could have the gospel restored to us today,

so that we could have the Book of Mormon. All right, there we go.

And then after you get all those trees colored in, let's do some brown for the trunks of the rest of the trees here.

And then this is the funnest one because we get to see the two different colors. You can see how when it goes into the light, everything gets brighter.

And the Book of Mormon is a lot like light,

because it helps us to know things that we wouldn’t know otherwise, because we get to learn the experiences of ancient prophets and their experiences with coming to know their Savior and the things that they wanted us to know today,

so that we could learn the things that they learned.

And then after you’ve got all this colored, if you want to, you could even put some more lines or something in this beam of light,

just to show the direction of all this light coming down through the trees.

One time Joseph Smith went to a quiet place to pray.

While there, he saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ in this sacred place.

And Joseph Smith, he was a prophet, and his work was to bring forth the Book of Mormon.

Here's our finished pictures of the Grove.

I think they all show what an amazing experience this was, that Joseph Smith had to bring forth the gospel in our day to see Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, so that he could bring forth the Book of Mormon. I had a lot of fun drawing this with you guys. I hope you come draw with us next time. We'll see you later. Bye.