For the last couple of years I am keeping a Bullet Journal. It’s not about having a space for creativity per se, I mainly use it to track my days, appointments, events and chores as was intended by Ryder Caroll when he shared his technique with the world. When needed I also use it as a diary, to empty my brain by writing. These journals are now treasured booklets about how my life has been. The good times, the boring times and the bad times including.
Because I recently had a little holiday, and received A LOT of craft supplies during the Christmas season, my 2023 BuJo pages went a little overboard. I am trying to be more creative, and drawing and painting seem to be my things for this. At the end of my holiday, I had multiple half-finished projects laying about. And was suddenly subscribed to a couple of creative courses…
To continue my creativity spree, I try to do something small at least a couple of days a week. To motivate myself I’ve continued working on my 2023 BuJo pages. They took up a lot of work. Seriously, I don’t know how anyone just jots stuff down like you see on live sessions all over social media. But maybe when I have got more practise and more experience, and am less afraid to make mistakes, I can do the same in a couple of months/years.
Here are a couple of pages I made during the last few weeks.
My January monthly spread. In Dutch we write “Januari” so that’s no spelling mistake. What did go wrong though, is that I drew only 6 days to a week. I fixed that by giving myself a constant brainfuck and adding a couple of days at the bottom to get to 31.
This was something very different for me, as I usual make something less designed but more functional. It was fun to do though, even though I still feel I used too dark colors when drawing with my Crayola super-tips.
Inspired and a bit irritated about the year at a glance page above, I tried something else (again) for my future log. Here I did use pencils for the colors, which made everything a bit softer but also took a very very very loooooong time to complete.
And I went all out with the watercolours for February, inspired by these two washi tapes. I’ve always wanted to try how this paper reacts to the water and… well… now I know. It was a fun exercise!
One of the gifts received last Christmas was a Hahnemuhle watercolor notebook. Maybe next month I’ll share some of the things I’ve made in there. 🙂