planning – Page 4 – Keeping it creative

art, bullet journal, Bullet journaling, creativity, lifestyle, Planning and journaling, watercolour painting

Setting up my Bullet Journal for January 2024: Watercolour winter scene and snowflakes theme

Posted on Jan 5, 2024Jan 5, 2024 by Laura

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you’re all having a good 2024 so far. I’m very late sharing my bullet journal spreads for this month for several reasons – one, we were away for Christmas and so I didn’t get out my paints until NYE, and two, the print and cut hack for making stickers using the Cricut Joy doesn’t work anymore and so I’ve resorted to purchasing the Cricut Xtra which is due to arrive today, the 4th January, with a view to creating some text stickers for my spreads.

Anyway, I hope you like the theme and the watercolour bits and pieces which I had great fun creating. On to the pages…

Front cover

Having chosen the theme, I did a bit of Googling, looking for winter scene watercolour painting and I found this gorgeous design on a blog post from way back in 2014. This inspired my front cover but I changed the colours up a bit. The trees were painted first using Intense Green (AKA phthalo green) mixed with a small amount of Payne’s Grey and Vandyke brown and a tiny bit of grey. When that was completely dry, I created the snowy ground using very watered down grey. Then, after drying, I mixed a range of blues for the sky. Whilst still wet, I used coarse salt sprinkles to create the snowy effect. Finally, I used white gouache for the snow on the trees and then paint flicks to give the idea of falling snow.

Photo credit: Laura Jones for Keeping It Creative

The original watercolour was then scanned in using my printer and I pasted it into an MS Publisher A5 page and added the January 2024 title. The colours never look the same as the original, but I’m still happy with how it turned out.

The calendar

My husband and I had a go at creating a blue background with salt sprinkles on New Years Eve! We enjoyed experimenting, and it was a great, relaxing activity to do in the evening and helped us to stay awake to see in the new year. Again, the piece was scanned in and this time, it was used to cover the whole page. I then cut out the calendar shape using some dot grid paper which I then positioned in a location on the pages which was close to where it would have been if I could see the dot grid. The titles were created using Cricut Design Space and printed when my machine eventually arrived!

When I’d finished it, I felt like something was missing so I used Design Space again to make lots of snowflake stickers in different sizes. I’ve done a snowflake theme in January previously, but this one looks very different so I don’t feel like I’m repeating designs.

Finances spread

My finances record is still working really well so I’ve kept to the same layout but changed the decor to go with my theme for January. I love the little watercolour scene I found on Design Space to make into a sticker!

TV watched record

I create one of these every quarter or so to record the series that I’ve watched on TV. This time, I’ve added a date column so I can see, at a glance, when we started watching each series. There’s already some great stuff on TV for January and we’re loving the black comedy / drama of season 2 of The Tourist. The genres are taken from IMDB.

Weekly Plans

I went for another Dutch door layout this month and used a second print out of my watercolour background to create page borders to either side. I couldn’t resist adding some more snowflake stickers.

Veganuary meal planning

My husband and I have been doing Veganuary, where you go vegan for the month of January for quite a few years now. We try to create a meal plan each week as this helps when we go shopping. We also try to do more homemade meals which are packed with nutritious veggies.

Final words…

I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at my spreads for this month. At the moment, January is proving to be more wet than snowy and our little garden is looking a bit soggy and flooded. I must say, I love pretty winter scenes with snow and sparkling frost but it’s not so much fun trying to drive in such conditions so I have mixed feelings about the weather at this time of year.

Wishing you a fantastic 2024,

art, bullet journal, Bullet journaling, creativity, Planning and journaling

Setting up my BuJo for July 2023: Summer holidays theme

Posted on Jul 3, 2023Jul 25, 2023 by Laura

This month in my bullet journal, I’ve cheated with the décor again and bought a couple of sets of stickers to make things quick, easy and colourful. I was so impressed with the quality of the gardening themed set, that I chose to purchase from the same shop LunarLucie on Etsy. I ordered in plenty of time so that they arrived before we headed off to Norfolk on holiday. I managed to create the cover spread which I shared on Instagram but the calendar and financial pages had to wait until we returned which is why I’m only getting around to sharing them today.

Front cover page

The style of this month’s cover is very similar to the one from June but I used all of the stickers from the tropical summer holiday sheet and a few from a tropical flowers set which complemented the others beautifully. The designs are so lovely and I’m really pleased with how the page turned out. I wasn’t happy with my lettering so I used some dotted grid paper to practise, then cut it out to stick in the centre.

Calendar page

I had plenty of tropical flower stickers left so use these to decorate and then filled in the spaces with sparkles.

Finances

I want this month to be a low spend one so I made my expenses section shorter. This left me with room to add a few financial affirmations in the space at the bottom.

Final words…

I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at my spreads for this month. I haven’t drawn up any weekly spreads yet but they’ll be pretty minimal in terms of decoration. I might just create a running task list as the only events on my calendar for this week are my usual exercise classes.

Wishing you all a lovely and fun-filled July,

art, bullet journal, Bullet journaling, creativity, Gouache painting, Planning and journaling

Setting up my Bullet Journal for February 2023: Valentine’s Love Heart theme

Posted on Feb 3, 2023 by Laura

January seems to have flown by and we’re now into February. I’ve only just got my spreads for the month finished as I’ve been busy setting up my new STM notebook and have also had quite a few sessions at the university this year so far. I did a hearts theme before (back in Feb 2021) and I enjoyed using my watercolours to mixing various shades of red and pink so I thought I’d give it another go but this time I used gouache for a more opaque finish. The design for the front cover was inspired by a Caroline Gardner mirror compact that I got for Christmas which features heart outlines.

My pretty compact mirror from Caroline Gardner

The front cover

After practicing painting heart shapes in the back of my old bullet journal, I created a template and lightly sketched the outlines with a pencil. I then mixed a shade of pink and then used a number 2 round brush to paint a small number of hearts. I repeated the process with various reds and pinks and also added 3 gold hearts using my Finetec metallic watercolour paints. After leaving the paint to dry thoroughly, I created a small cream label for the month and the year using a gorgeous brush letter font which I recently downloaded called Northern Lights Script.

Calendar page

For the month on two pages calendar, I mixed similar colours and painted a range of filled hearts in different sizes. This time I used a size 0 round brush as the shapes were smaller. This time I very lightly hand sketched the heart shapes with a 2H pencil. When I’d finished, I realised that I hadn’t done any gold hearts so I decided to add some sparkle using a Uniball Signo gold gel pen creating dots, stars and curved diamond shapes.

Finances

I’ve been enjoying using this format of financial tracker for a while now and I just change up the colours each month.

Weekly plan and rolling weekly

This is the first time I’ve done a week-on-one-page spread but now I do a rolling task list for the week I don’t need as much room as I’m only recording events, gym sessions and days out. The hearts for each day were inked using a heart outline (made using a punch), a gorgeous red/gold ink and a mini finger sponge. You can’t really see the iridescence in the photo but it looks really pretty when the hearts catch the light.

My future log for my new Bullet Journal

I created my future log for 12 months, starting in March 2023 and I’m really pleased with how simple and effective it is so I thought I would share here. It makes use of a Dutch door set up and I added little tabs for ease of use. Using a Dutch Door means that you create one title which can be seen from a number of pages.

Final words…

I’m really pleased with how my pages turned out and I hope you like them too. Doing some painting in your bullet journal is a super relaxing and mindful activity which I really enjoy. As long as your pages are a good weight and you don’t use too much water or add too many layers of paint there should be no bleed through or page wrinkling.

Wishing you all a wonderful February,

art, bullet journal, Bullet journaling, creativity, Mindfulness, Planning and journaling

Setting up my Bullet Journal for January 2023: Winter snowflakes theme

Posted on Jan 3, 2023Jan 3, 2023 by Laura

Happy New Year to all of my readers! Wishing you a fantastic 2023. I’m a bit late sharing my bullet journal pages this time as I only just got them finished. I’ve done a snowflakes theme before, but last time, I did a monochrome version with just my Pigma micron pens. I ordered some new brush and fine nib pens to arrive just after Christmas and there are lots of lovely blues in the set of 24, so I thought I’d try out the fine tips on my January spreads. I hope you like them and as always, if you’ve shared your pages for this month, feel free to link them in the comments.

Cover page

This month’s cover page is heavily influenced by a design from @createmore.se on Instagram. I’ve changed it up slightly by adding sparkles, dots and small circles but the composition is mainly the same. I used my circle drawing tool and, as I messed up the lettering in my notebook, I cut a page from the back using my X-Acto knife, trimmed it down, created the wreath and then stuck it in after I’d finished. I decided to do a rough freehand border around it to make it stand out. My new pens are from the Ohuhu brand and I ordered the mid tone range which has some lovely pastel colours.

Monthly Calendar

I’m really pleased with how this one turned out. It’s my usual grid layout with different snowflake designs filling the space. It took me a while but it was a nice bit of mindful drawing in the evening of the first of January,

Finances

Again, this spread is self explanatory. By the end of last month, my expenses table was completely full – in fact I ran out of space! Hopefully, this month will be a lot lighter on the spending front!

TV series watched

I don’t do one of these each month but my last one ran up until the end of December so I’ve just set up a new one. I like to record all of the different series we watch and the particular genres we enjoy. It’s nice to see all of the things we’ve watched and is a good reminder of what we’ve seen.

Veganuary Week 1 Meal Planning

My husband and I are doing Veganuary again this year which means we’re eating vegan for the whole of January. It gets easier every year but we still need to do a meal plan each week so that we know what we’re having for lunch and dinner each day. I also find the meal planning pages from previous years really useful. Obviously, this page could be useful whatever your diet but we don’t tend to spend long thinking of meal ideas the rest of the year.

Weekly Plan

This is my first weekly of the month. I used the same snowflake design for each day because coming up with different designs is what took a lot of time for the cover and calendar. I messed up on the spacing for this spread so the bottom columns are one dot space shorter than the ones at the top but it doesn’t bother me too much as I tend to write less at the weekends anyway.

Final words…

That’s all of the spreads I’ve drawn up so far. I have my running task list to set up this morning which will go on the page after my weekly plan and I will of course be doing more meal planning spreads and weekly plans over the weeks. I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at my spreads for this month. We have no snow here at the moment but it is certainly cold enough to get some white stuff soon.

art, bullet journal, Bullet journaling, Hand lettering, Planning and journaling

Setting up my Bullet Journal for December 2022: Christmas trees theme

Posted on Dec 1, 2022Dec 1, 2022 by Laura

Last month, I decided really early on that I wanted to do a Christmas trees theme for December. I was debating doing a watercolour scene featuring real trees and snow for the front cover but knew this would be quite time consuming as I would have to find tutorial to help me and then I would have to paint all of the other trees throughout the month for a cohesive look. However, in the last few days of November, I took to YouTube, searching the videos for inspiration and found this fairly easy but pretty set up from Claire Marie Bee which I was excited to recreate and make my own. I’ve copied quite a few of her ideas and, although it took quite a while to sketch out the tree pattern it was simple enough to do and I love the result.

Front cover

I started the process of creating the front cover by sketching the outlines of the trees in a diagonal pattern. I then turned to the back of my bujo and spent some time practising different designs. The inspiration for the trees was taking from Claire’s video and also from images I found by typing in ‘tree doodles’ into Google. I used just two colours of Tombow ABT for the colouring – dark olive 158 and asparagus 192 and a red Pentel sign brush pen for the sparkles. The page was then outlined using a 0.,1 micron. I also used Claire’s idea of writing the word December on vellum and this meant I could practise a few times and pick the best one!

Photo credit: Laura Jones for Keeping It Creative Blog

The monthly calendar

This is my usual 6×6 box calendar with trees dotted about in the background. I didn’t create a pattern with these two pages – I just chose some designs and placed them where I felt they would look good. Again, I wrote December on vellum, this time using a Tombow brush pen in poppy red 856. The Pentel pen and the red Tombow are very similar in colour and I don’t mind that they’re not a perfect match.

Finances

These pages are the same layout as I’ve been using for a while now. Again, I added a title using the Pentel sign brush pen. The words income and expenses are printed on green paper and stuck on because I messed up the writing on them first time. I wish the words were central on the page, but I guess I’ll just have to put up with it!

Final words…

I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at my spreads for December. If you like finding time to do something creative each week, I really recommend having a go at doing some tree doodles. My sketches are 2cms wide by 3cms tall, but you can make them any size you want. Sitting down and quietly drawing is a wonderfully mindful activity and a great way to destress during the very busy month of December.