hey friends elizabeth here from plant based bride back again with another video and today
i'm setting up my bullet journal for july in my new bullet journal for the second half of the year
today's video is kindly sponsored by skillshare i'll talk to you about them at the end of the
video but for now let's jump right in to the cover page as you probably already saw in the thumbnail
this month's theme is lemons i've actually done a lemon theme once before many years ago so
if you really want to see how much improvement can come with regular practice of your art you
can go check out that old video and see how my skills have changed over the years
just from creating every single day i've recreated a couple old themes just so that i have a chance
to tackle them from a different perspective with improved skills with new tools in my tool belt
so this is no exception it's really cool to tackle the same subject matter the same theme
after a few more years of experience when it comes to technique and understanding of my materials
even just my ability to imagine what a spread could look like and be more creative in how i lay
things out i think has come a really long way over the years so i'm excited to try something new here
i'm using my winsor newton paints as always and as always i'll link all the supplies
i'm using in the description box as you can tell from my palette i am focusing on green
and yellow for my lemons with a blue accent and as always i am also going to be using white gouache
i love to use white in any painting for highlights but also to mix with whatever colors i'm using
so that i can get some variation just to add more detail so i'm starting with a flat painting green
and yellow just getting the shape of my lemons laid out here and once i have all the basics
in i'll be able to add more detail you could stop here if you wanted and just have these simple bold
shapes or you could do what i'm planning on doing which is adding a little bit more detail
so that the leaves and the lemons have some more depth to them
look a little more three-dimensional and a little more real even though i'm not going
for total realism here i do want them to look a little less cartoony or abstract
so
do
i'm going around the edges adding extra lemons and leaves to fill
the blank spaces so that everything feels filled in and evenly spread out
do
once the first layer was dry i mixed my yellow and my green with a little bit of white
so that i could add highlights to the lemons and to the leaves i decided that
my light source would be coming from above so i tried to add that lightness along the curve
of the lemons on the top edge and same thing with the leaves i tried to add a highlight to
the top portion of the leaves following the shape of the leaves i wasn't too precious
about this especially on the leaves because we'll be adding more details on top of this
this is just to add a little bit more dimension but it's not the final result so you don't have
to worry too much about being really careful here next i'm mixing my indigo watercolor with
a little bit of zinc white gouache and using this to fill in the background i really wanted
my cover page to be bold to jump off the page and i thought it would be really cool to create
a scene as if you're standing under a lemon tree looking up at the sky at night so you see
the dark blue sky all the stars through the lemons and the leaves
i'm mixing my green with a little bit of my dark blue
to create a darker shade of green to add a little bit more detail some veining through the leaves
i also grabbed a darker orangey brown to mix with my yellow to add shadows to my lemons
i'm also adding a brighter highlight to each lemon along the curve to really make them look
three-dimensional and adding some darker and lighter dots on the opposite side of the lemon
to that main highlight to give a hint of that bumpy lemon texture now you probably noticed
that i didn't paint the blue background all the way to the edge and that's because i was
planning on doing a little cutaway here so i only painted it to where i planned on cutting
this page once i got that first little peekaboo window cut out i'm gonna go along and just cut
out all my tabs for my weeklies as i always like to do alternating between a page with a tab and a
page with no tab to accommodate for my fodex door rolling weeklies while i continue to cut these out
i want to share some lemon facts with you all even though lemons are heavily associated with florida
and southern europe lemons actually first came from north burma northeast asia and china
lemon trees produce a surprising quantity of lemons a large lemon tree in a commercial
orchard can produce 500 to 600 pounds of lemons in a single year this is thousands of lemons from a
single tree in a year which is absolutely wild not only do lemon trees produce a ridiculous number
of lemons a year but they also live for a very long time the average life expectancy of a lemon
tree is around 50 years but if you take really good care of them they can live up to 100 years
which could be over 270 thousand lemons from a single tree in its lifetime the two american
states of california and arizona produce 95 of the entire lemon crop for the entire world which
is extra wild when you consider the fact that lemons didn't even originate on that continent
getting back to what i'm doing here in my bullet journal i flipped over to the next spread which
is going to be my calendar spread and i wanted to create essentially the opposite of the cover page
still having some branches with these lemons on the lemon tree but with a white background
instead of the blue background i'm also creating a really simple calendar here in the center and
i'm painting my lemons and my branches and leaves the same way i did on the cover page starting with
the basic shapes and then slowly adding more detail highlights shadows and a little bit of
texture lemons also have antibacterial properties which make lemons a great choice for when you're
feeling under the weather i'm also painting my tabs as i like to do and for these tabs i
wanted to do a gradient from a really light lemony yellow all the way down to a dark orangey yellow
getting started with my first weekly spread here i'm folding at the center page to create that
faux dutch door if you want to learn more about this weekly that i use the rolling weekly
i'll link the video where i go into details you can check that out learn how to use it how to set
it up but i'm just adding a little bit of lemony goodness to the spread along the top and adding
really simple rounded corner rectangles for each day of the week as well as my weekly task list
you can also use lemon juice to lighten your hair does anyone remember sun in
i thought it'd be really cute to have a slice of lemon at the top of each day
to put the date on so that's what i decided to do here
lemons also help to prevent other fruits from going bad
if you massage a fruit and lemon juice they'll last longer without turning brown and going moldy
than if you hadn't doused them in lemon juice i'm gonna have to try that one
and just continuing to paint my tabs slowly getting darker and darker with each tab
do
if you enjoyed today's lemon facts leave a yellow emoji in the comments down below
finally working on this last spread here i wanted to do a quote and i had a couple quotes assembled
that were a little less obvious than the one i ended up choosing but i just couldn't help
myself i almost picked this quote ironically because i kind of find this quote irritating
it has a little bit of a toxic positivity vibe i'm not gonna lie sometimes when life gives you
lemons you just can't make lemonade you know sometimes they're not actually lemons they're
rocks and you know you can't make lemonade out of a rock you know what i mean anyway i wanted
to use a different quote but i just couldn't help myself it just felt wrong somehow to not use this
quote it's the most well-known quote to do with lemons to exist in the entire world i don't know
that for a fact but i feel pretty certain you can fact check me in the comments if i'm wrong
but i ended up deciding to just go for it to just accept the cheesiness just live in the full glory
of this overused saying so i wanted to kind of mirror my cover page to my calendar opposition
of the dark background to the light background so on the left i'm gonna have a dark blue background
and half a lemon that's dripping out lemon juice with the first half of the quote when
life gives you lemons and then on the opposite side just using the white background of the page
the second half of the quote or saying make lemonade and then just a little mason jar
with some lemonade inside with a slice of lemon on the edge i feel like this is
extra ironic and maybe just this whole theme in general because i'm not a big lemon fan
taste of lemons not really my thing and if i could never drink lemonade again for
the rest of my life i would be totally content this is definitely more for the
summery aesthetic than it is something that i feel personally attached to in any way whatsoever
adding some final details here and then we are done before i show you the final flip through
though i do want to talk to you quickly about today's video's sponsor skillshare as all of
you know i am a huge fan of skillshare and i've been taking classes through skillshare for years
skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for anyone who
loves learning and wants to explore their creativity if you want to learn new skills
this is your chance to invest in yourself and your personal growth if you clicked that link to see my
original lemon theme and you're wondering how on earth i got from that level of skill to my current
level of skill the answer is practice consistency and taking classes on skillshare from photography
and illustration to graphic design and fine art you can find classes that will match your
goals and interests i've taken almost every single class on skillshare that has to do with
watercolor or gouache painting learning from other people's experiences can really help to
supercharge our progress when it comes to getting used to any particular medium the class i'm taking
right now is gouache florals explore shape color and creative composition by peggy dean i think
it's great no matter how long you've been using a particular medium to kind of refresh your skills
and i love learning from different artists who use paint in different ways i'm really
enjoying this class so far and i feel like it was really helping me to get some new ideas
for how i could approach painting these lemons in a way that maybe i wouldn't have thought of
before skillshare is ad-free so you can stay in the zone while you're exploring
new skills new premium classes launch each week so there's always something new to discover also the
entire catalog is now available with subtitles in spanish french portuguese and german because
skillshare is sponsoring this video the first 1000 people to use the link in my description
or my code plant based bride will get a one month free trial of skillshare thank you so much to
skillshare for sponsoring this video and now let's look at the flip through of all my lemony spreads
i really love the contrast between the cover page and the monthly calendar that flip from
night to i love how bright and summery and airy these breads feel super fun and fresh it almost
has me convinced that i want to have a glass of lemonade but i know that i i really don't
if you made it all the way to the end of this video thank you give this video a like if you
enjoyed it and subscribe if you haven't already thank you so much to my patrons for your support
you all are the absolute best if you want to get some printables for this month's setup be
sure to join the squad over on patreon and with that i'm gonna get going thank you so
much for watching this video and i'll see you really soon in my next one bye friends
you