PLAN WITH ME 🌼 April 2021 Bullet Journal Vintage Spring Theme

Hello, hello! Um, happy spring! Today we are going to be setting up my month of April in my bullet journal and to get into kind of like a creative mode because I wasn't really feeling too inspired in the moment, I decided to get out this little matchbox thing that my friend recently got me. Um, and each one has a little like inspiration for getting in that like creative zone. So mine said to put on some music or go outside, so I put on some like ambient music and we're gonna get- we're gonna get to journaling! Um, this month I wanted to do a spring kind of daisy and sun theme and my uh theme for March was sunflowers, so I thought the two would kind of like go together really well. So yeah, I'm gonna try to do like a different sort of style uh illustration that I haven't really tried before, so we'll see how it goes, but I'm- I'm excited. So first things first, I'm gonna get out the paper I'm gonna be using. Usually I use pretty much purely watercolor paper for all of my paintings, but I got my hands on some dodgy paper. I made like a huge order a couple months ago and it uh finally came in and I've been eyeing for so long. Basically they make their uh paper out of recycled materials and papers, so some of them have like newspaper scraps in them. All of them are a little like imperfect looking, which I love, and they have kind of like a really awesome looking texture. I'm really excited. I- I thought this would be perfect since I'm trying to go for like a 30s animation style. A lot of like, I don't know, when you look at vintage kind of artwork, they have a lot of texture within their- within the painting or within the drawing. And as you can see, I already sketched it out. I just flipped the paper over and now I'm just gonna transfer it to uh the paper I'm going to be using. Also a good thing about doing it this way for this kind of paper is I was worried my pencil would kind of rip the paper as I was drawing on top of it because if you feel this kind of paper, it's very like soft and fibery. So you have like a pretty high chance of ripping it if you're using like a small like mechanical pencil, let's say. So this kind of like doing the transfer kind of eliminates that hassle. Um, and I also just had it sketched beforehand because I had the idea in my mind a couple days ago and I was like, okay, I have to sketch this down. But yeah, it's a little sun and daisy and mushroom and I think it's gonna turn out so cute. And now we're just gonna get to painting. So I'm gonna get out my uh Holbein acrylic gouache paints, which I've been using a lot. Um, I really want to do a watercolor next month. I think next month is the month that I'm going to go back to doing watercolor again because I feel like I've been out of practice. But for this specific type of paper, since I wanted to use this paper really bad, you can't really put watercolor on it because it's so soft that it's not gonna work with water very well. So you want to use like a more heavy duty like acrylic or a gouache paint. I'm gonna dip my paintbrush in a little bit of water just to get it kind of like moving around, but I'm not gonna go in with like a ton of water for this one. And before I get to painting, I wanted to talk about Skillshare, who is today's sponsor for the video. You guys know I've been using them for like about two years now, I want to say. And if you don't know who they are, they are a online learning community with thousands of different classes in a ton of different like creative realms like painting, knitting, ceramics. Um, and I've been personally really getting into ceramics lately. I tried it for the first time a couple weeks ago and did a whole video on it, which will be coming like mid-April. But ever since, I've been taking a bunch of ceramics classes. This one I believe is called EasyClear Earrings by Kylie Bennett. If you guys want to try out Skillshare Premium, which allows you unlimited access to all of their classes, you can click the link in my description. Alright, so now I'm gonna get to painting, and I'm gonna uh paint with this like really pretty gold color that I mixed. I think I took like that bright yellow and a little bit of ochre. A lot of the time when I think of like vintage kind of 70s-ish style paintings, I often think of the colors being really bright, but also muted, if that makes sense. So that's what I'm kind of trying to do with these. I'm trying to make the colors bright, but also like a little bit more muted, not like a neon yellow or anything. Um, and I'm noticing that the paint doesn't go on as easily as it would obviously with a, you know, a watercolor paper or an acrylic paper. It's gonna be a little more hard to work with, um, just because there's a lot of like little fibers that kind of get in the way sometimes. And it's also not something that you want to layer a ton of paint on. Uh, you kind of want to go in uh with one layer. So I almost actually like went in with a full like brown archway and was gonna paint all the details over it, but I'm so glad that I didn't, because them colors just end up mixing together really weirdly. So you definitely want to do it this way, where you just fill in each little white little piece at a time. A lot of my inspiration for this painting came from uh, if you guys have ever heard of it, it's this game called Cuphead. And uh, so I kind of wanted to try out like a 70s color scheme slash like theme with a 30s style kind of animation. Since that game has like this iconic art look of the 1930s animations, which is super cool. I love that game so much. It's so difficult, but so, so fun. But yeah, I'm kind of like, that's my inspiration for this painting, but um, I definitely am gonna need like a lot of practice. And I'm trying to practice more like different types of illustration to see what I like the best. Um, so I've been doing a lot of digital artwork this month, which has been super fun. Um, but yeah, I thought I should try it out kind of like on paper. This is probably not the best paper to try it out on, because it's so hard to paint on. But uh, I'm really liking it so far. I did a little rainbow. The rainbow turned out a little bit funky, I would say. I ended up fixing it in my like final print later in uh, on my iPad. But it was just because I kept layering, and you can't layer on this paper very well at least. Um, but yeah, I'm just giving my little like animated son and daisy some blush, um, and doing her little like makeup. And it's so cute. I love them. Um, and for the line work, I noticed that a lot of the time with like more vintage artwork, that the animation has a lot of um, heavy line work on them. So I'm taking my black pen and just doing the line work surrounding each little figure that I've done. And it kind of brings out that like animation style a lot better. And I'm also making my little son starry-eyed, which I think she looks so cute. And this is the finished painting. I think it turned out so cute, and I love the colors. I, I think the colors turned out really good. Um, it was definitely difficult to paint, um, on this paper, but I, I really want to practice more with it and uh, see how it goes. And I love it with the like textured paper. It looks so cool to me. But yeah, um, now we're going to probably scan this. So I'm gonna go over to my scanner. Still have yet to get a professional scanner. I saw a couple of you, um, in my last video suggest a couple. I noted those down and I'm gonna look into it. I just had my, I had my, uh, MacBook Pro and my Canon DSLR, both very expensive items, uh, both break on me this month. So I had to like pay a ton of money to get my camera fixed. Luckily my computer was fixed through like Apple care, but it was a little pricey. So I'm probably gonna wait to, uh, buy a scanner for a little bit. The one that I have now is fine. It's just old and I need to do a lot of editing with it to make everything look okay. But as you can tell by the prints, they ended up looking great in my opinion. And they actually captured a lot of that texture that was on the original. Um, it's kind of bright, so you can't see it in this, like in this shot, but once we get close, you can see all the little like divots and holes and stuff that are were in the original. And yeah, both of these guys will be available as prints in my shop. And this is how my April spread turned out. All right. So now we're going to be getting to more of the planning portion of the video. So we're going to do a little weekly spread and then also like a planning page for the month. And I'm first going to get out a bunch of the, uh, little drawings, digital drawings that I've done over the past month. Um, I did some of these for my like Twitch badges, uh, a couple of these just for fun. And so I wanted to just like print them all out and have them in like a certain area. Eventually I'm going to make a lot of these actual sticker sheets. Once I actually like finalize them and everything, these are kind of like the rough drafts I would say, but yeah, I'm probably going to do a shop update in the next couple weeks and hopefully I'll have like a bunch of new sticker designs and everything. Um, but yeah, I just printed them out on some sticker paper and cut them out. And now I'm going to take out my Archer and Olive, uh, acrylograph pens, which I've been using a lot lately, and I'm going to do my weekly spread setup. Um, by the way, all of the like materials and everything that I've used in this video, I'll link in my description box. Also, I thought it'd be fun to try this out this time, but if you guys have any like theme ideas for next month, put them in the comments, uh, in this video, whether it's a theme that you'd want me to try, that's like something I've never done before, or something that you just think would be fun. Um, I would love to hear your guys' uh, ideas because every time it comes to the end of the month, I'm like, okay, what theme am I going to do that I haven't done in the past? It's so difficult because I've done so many spreads, um, and I always try to make them like a little bit different than the past ones that I've done. But yeah, I'd love to hear you guys' ideas. And then I'll give me like, uh, definitely some inspiration to go off of for the next one. Um, but anyways, uh, I finished the left side of my spread. I think I made it a little too, I want to say chaotic. I think I drew a little too much on the left side. So on the right side, I'm going to keep it a little more simple. Um, I just did a to-do list on the top and then I am doing some little boxes on the bottom for, uh, Thursday and Friday. And I'm using little bunny stickers cause this is going to be the week of, uh, Easter and this is how my spread turned out. I think it turned out so cute. Um, and it was fun to use all the stickers. I think, uh, I think sometimes I get a little stressed about making each and every spread this like hour long thing where you have to draw a bunch of stuff on it. So it was nice to just take these stickers and like place them in there. And on this spread, I'm going to keep it simple, uh, on this one again and do a, just kind of like a list for my goals, um, my business goals. And then I'm also going to do one for like art ideas and, uh, places that I want to go or places that I did go throughout the month. And I'm going to place my little, like, or not heart stamp, my flower stamp, um, as the border. And I think it turned out so good and it was so simple. Sometimes the cutest spreads are the simplest spreads, uh, cause every once in a while I'll go a little too crazy like on the last one and make it a little too hectic. But anyways, this was my finished, uh, bullet journal setup for April. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Uh, in a couple weeks I'll be coming out with a clay, kind of like ceramic video, making pins and earrings and stuff. So look out for that and subscribe if you haven't already. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!