In today's tutorial we're doing a sweet spring themed monthly front page for our
April bullet journal
Hi guys welcome back my name is Shayda Campbell this
week we celebrated our first day of spring in the northern hemisphere and
now as of filming we're having the most beastly snowstorm but regardless of
that I thought it would be fun to do a very spring inspired April front page
for our planner for our bullet journal so that's what we're gonna do today and
I've been noticing something lately about the channel and that's that there
is not a lot of animals represented here we don't often do animal tutorials and
that's kind of sad because I know people love to draw cute little animals we did
do some winter watercolor Birds back in December but that's about it
and there's a reason that we don't do a lot of animals on this channel and that
is simply that I really struggle with drawing animals they're just not my
forte and so naturally I tend to steer clear of them but I really wanted to
draw a cute little bunny for today's video and so I worked through it and I
wanted to tell you guys that it took me a whole afternoon of rough sketching and
I practiced this bunny and I used tracing paper to you know keep what I
liked about my initial sketch get rid of or change what I didn't like so that's
how I got to the finished product that I'm gonna share with you guys today and
I just want to take a second to thank everyone who's supporting me on patreon
your support means so much to me it helps this channel continue forward and
since this is the April bullet journaling tutorial after you watch
today's video you'll be able to head over to my patreon site and get your
monthly planner printable I've just designed it also a nice spring theme and
I also did something different this my I'm releasing all of the front page
illustration so the bunny that we're gonna work through today say the
February page with the window and the teacup that's all available now for you
to print out so something different okay well I'm gonna go get my bullet journal
out you guys are gonna click that subscribe button and I will see you in a
moment and make sure to watch until the end of today's video because I have some
big news to share in my past bullet journaling videos we've done a lot of
monthly and weekly layouts and so today we're kind of gonna focus on the front
page and work this really cute spring illustration so you can see here in the
other month we would do the month title on the left with the calendar on the
right and then I have a full month at-a-glance layout as well as a weekly
layout and I've shown how to do these in other videos you can also print them if
you're a member of my patreon February same thing illustration on the right
calendar on the left and January similar but I noticed I wasn't really using the
large calendar so much I just need to see the dates at a glance so today I'm
gonna try something different I've been experimenting a lot I'm new to bullet
journaling so actually I was doing some fun weekly layouts if you follow me on
instagram @shaydacampbell I was posting this stuff where I was doing
these kind of more crowded fun collage type layouts and I also did a video
about this kind of layout as well and I'll link that in the description but so
I've been trying things out changing things up and so we're gonna do
something a little different today so I'm starting here by I want to put April
on the right hand side crazy I know so I'm just marking my center line and I'm
gonna write April there and then I'm just carefully putting two lines that
are the same size to kind of border it in border the title in and then I'm
doing some simple little botanical illustrations so leaves and vines
some of my little spiral roses some flowers some little twigs and you can
practice with that in pencil or if you're confident you can just go
straight ahead in pen and start doing some cute little botanical illustrations
and they're sort of emerging from the line so the illustrations they very much
cut off at the line as almost as if they're growing out of it and the ones
on top are growing up and the ones on the bottom are growing down and if you
want to see more videos about floral and leaf illustration I have a couple and
I'll link those in the description below so that's what the title looks like when
it's all done just a simple cursive and these two lines and then a simple floral
illustration but it's very punchy you get a lot of bang for your buck with
that sort of design with the two lines it looks so pretty and then I'm just
doing a very very small calendar you can see me drawing the date or writing out
the days of the week and then just keeping to my dot grid making a nice
grid of a calendar and that's what my sort of title page looks like when it's
done I've got my little calendar my April
title and then I've got the whole left-hand side available for a fun
illustration but even though we're focusing on the front page right now you
guys can still get the monthly layout that I always do and that's available
over on patreon okay let's get started with our beautiful spring illustration
guys I love you so much I'm gonna draw a bunny I know so many people love animals
and drawing animals they're not my forte but I'm trying and I do think my bunny
turned out fine but it was hard for me let me just say so anyways let's start
with a nice rectangle in the middle here you can make yours as large as you want
mine I just came in about five dots on every side and I'm gonna put the bunny
in the left-hand corner since he's facing sort of to the right and you just
start by sketching him out you want to get the shape of the head right more
than anything and he kind of has this little almost
doglike nose where it's just a semicircle and then the to this little
cheek sort of emerge from the nose the ears are sort of right on top of his
head and you're drawing him on the three-quarter angle so you're seeing one
side of his face much more than the other and that can be a little tricky
especially if you haven't done it before but just follow along with this and
you'll start to get sort of the feel for it but one side of the face is much
bigger the nice thing about this bunny is his body is very sort of it's just
like a big lump so you can draw that I know you can draw that and the eye is
kind of this slanted teardrop shape and all I can say about the eye is just play
around with it until you get it the right sort of size and shape and put a
big highlight in it oh my gosh I drew so many Donnie Darko bunnies I'm
not kidding I had these scary scary bunnies and I actually had to stop
filming I couldn't get it and I just had to practice for a little while but this
is what I came up with so I was quite happy with him when I was all done okay
Bunny's done feeling good what we're gonna do with the rest of the
illustration here is just draw this sort of wildflower patch and everything is
sort of going upwards everything other than the bunny is on the vertical so I'm
drawing all these flowers sort of growing up and you know sort of reaching
for the sky so it's quite it's it's very sort of vertical drawing except for the
bunny in the foreground I'm gonna start going over this in my pigma microns I'm
using the 005 in the 02 some of the smaller nibs today so that you guys can
really see but I'm not gonna get super into the floral illustration because
we've covered that a lot and I know some people will say oh you always do
flowers but that's what I love to draw and I think when you sort of find what
you love it's so great to dig into that and go with it and another thing is that
if you are having trouble if you're struggling to draw a bunny well once you
get him it's nice to enhance the drawing or the piece that you're working on with
something that you're also really comfortable with so here's my bunny that
I'm not so comfortable with but I'm adding all these botanical drawings and
they're sort of in my wheelhouse when you're doing the botanicals add lots of
lines for shading and that will really make your illustration pop and you can
make a flower that you're maybe not even that happy with really look great and
come to life by adding shading and I'm just drawing lines and shadow wherever I
think there might be some so inside the petals would that be a little darker
yeah sure maybe the sun's not hitting in there when you're shading you get to
decide where that light is coming from is it coming from the right or the left
totally up to you so say it's coming from the right you can add more lines
and shadow on the left-hand side of everything in the drawing so just adding
those little details can really make your illustration pop and especially
when you're illustrating in pen you need to add some detail and it helps it to
not just look like a sort of like a contour drawing like a coloring book
image and I'm just adding a bunch of different sort of floral and leaf shapes
I'm not doing tons but I'm doing a couple different ones to add some
variety so some of the I'm just drawing lines that sort of shoot straight up or
you know they they're curved lines but they're going straight up from the
bottom of the image and then every line has sort of different shapes of petals
so some of the petals you can see are sort of little hearts and then other
ones of these kind of floppy circles and by doing different leaves
but still repeating it makes a nice cohesive piece so what I mean by that is
say you pick three different types of plants that you do to make them up so
you've got variety you've got three different ones but then you're going to
repeat them so you also have this nice pattern and repetition within the piece
that makes it all sort of come together and look nice and this is a fun one to
draw that has a nice detail to it you're drawing sort of these little shoots that
come off the main stem and then they all just have a little heart shape on the
end or you could make it a three leaf but it has a nice detailed element and
it's quite easy to do so I'm just going along adding lots of different flowers
and leaves and trying to sort of make them a little bit inter woven so that it
does look natural and so that it looks like you know a field of wildflowers now
in the very foreground here I'm just gonna do one plant that's sort of coming
forward that's a little more 3-dimensional than the rest of the very
sort of flat 2d image and so the bottom leaf is kind of a heart shape so it's
very much coming towards the viewer and I'm just drawing a few little very
nondescript shaped flowers and making these leaves a little more detailed
there's lots of teeth and veining on them but that's just sort of nice
another nice thing that you can put in the foreground of this image also a good
trick is to make one side of the leaf a little darker than the other and that
just helps to make your illustration pop and I'm just going to finish off the
floral part of this piece by adding a couple more flowers and as I said doing
lots of line shading and trying to make everything look like it's overlapping
and interwoven you don't just want a bunch of flat flowers that are sort of
one two three in a row try to make them all wild and then I'm
going to start going over the bunny and again like I said animals are not my
forte and so I found this a bit scary pen is so permanent you know it just
feel doesn't feel scary or permanent when I'm doing flowers but when I'm
doing animals it's all of a sudden seems very permanent so I'm just going to
round the shape of the bunny around the contour and I'm doing a nice sketchy
line but still a hard line so that he pops out of the background and making
sure to mark off the highlight in his eyes you don't want a big dead black eye
you want to leave lots of highlight there so lots of white space and once
I'm done the bunny I'm also going over my border so remember that rectangle
that we drew of course part of it is now obscured by flowers but the part that
isn't you want to go over and reinforce and you might even do a double line but
it's the line looks nice as well so make sure
you do that and make sure you don't draw over the flowers you want to be really
careful and then I want to add some stippling to my piece because I don't
want the bunny to look like the flowers are sort of growing right out of his
back so this will help add some shadow and depth and it'll just look cool and
detailed so what I'm doing is I'm making the bottom of the piece really dark or
the bottom of the rectangle and then I'm making the top much lighter white
so I've got this very concentrated amount of stippling near the bottom and
actually across the top of the rabbit as well and then the rest of the piece the
stippling gets much much lighter and eventually there isn't any right at the
top so you'll see what I mean here in a second but this takes a minute to do but
it doesn't take that long so I didn't film it all but I just did the stippling
and that's what it looks like when it's all done and I do have a video about how
to do stippling successfully so I'll link that as well but I did kind of a
u-shape so it's very dark behind the bunny it's very dark at the bottom and
sort of up the sides a bit and then very white and clean in the middle there so
it really gives the piece some room to breathe and I'm super pleased with the
way it turned out there was only one problem and that's that the bunny was
like glowing white I needed to add shading to him and I was really nervous
about that and so I you know I felt okay I have to do lines shading because it's
gonna look I want it to look like fur and I just tried my best and I think it
turned out fine you know I was trying something totally new here but I was
quite happy with the result just did he's sketchy broken lines and made it
best as I could look like fur so that's what my page looks like when it's all
done I was very very happy with it and I hope you like it too because this is
available to be printed you'll find this title page and some of the other month
front pages on my patreon site right now so super easy to print and stick in your
own planner well thank you guys so much for watching
today I hope you will give this bunny illustration a try and I hope you don't
draw too many Donnie Darko esque bunnies like I did make sure you hit that
subscribe button and now for my big news thank you guys for watching today's
video I hope you like my bunny okay for my big news I'm gonna be writing a book
I am writing a book it's happening and I've actually known for a while now and
I sort of kept the news under my hat because saying it out loud just made it
so real and it's such a big deal it's definitely a dream come true and it's so
exciting but it's also terrifying like all good things in life it's exciting
and scary but wonderful and I can't wait to see what you guys are gonna say about
this and I really really want you to comment because I'd love to know what do
you want this book to be what is in your dream Shayda tomb is it all new material
is it sort of a collection of the best of the channel material maybe a marriage
of both yes let me know any thoughts whatever comes to mind you just comment
below because I could use all the guidance and direction I can get because
really this book is for you guys okay thanks again for watching have a great
weekend and I will see you next week with a new tutorial!