(upbeat music)
- Everyone it's Amanda, welcome back to my channel,
you guys already know what today's video is,
it is my April plan with me, and bullet journal setup.
I'm gonna be doodling,
I'm gonna be setting up my spread for the month,
and it's gonna be a fun time.
But before we go any further
I'd like to thank Storyblocks for sponsoring this video,
and supporting the channel.
If you've been a longtime viewer of my channel,
then you know that Storyblocks
has been a great resource of mine,
that I've really put to use in my journals,
and in my projects,
You can download all of the high-quality
stock images your heart desires,
at a fraction of the cost,
There library has over 400,000 images,
vectors, illustrations, textures, icons,
whatever you need, they have it.
I'm going to be showing you guys,
how I personally incorporate them into my bullet journal,
later on into this video.
All of their content is royalty-free,
so used on commercial and personal projects,
which is just a really good peace of mind to have.
Sometimes when you just look up stuff on Google Images,
or other image searching websites,
stuff with watermarks will come up,
or you don't know whether you have the licensing rights,
but with Storyblocks all of that is covered.
Plus, you can save on millions
of additional marketplace images,
where artists take home 100% of the profits,
which is something I love to support,
and to top it off, new images are always added,
so there's always something fresh for you to download.
All in all, I really do recommend Storyblocks,
it's such a great resource to have,
so if you wanna check it out,
you can click the link in my description box
to save $50 off an annual membership.
But anyways, now it's time for my personal
favorite part of these videos,
where I get to showcase some of your beautiful recreations.
You can see them all above me right now,
these are from my last bullet journal,
plan with me, and setup which was for March.
So if you happen to recreate this month spread,
of course I would love to see it,
you can post a picture on Instagram,
and tag me in the photo, not just the caption.
I love scrolling through my tag photos,
and just seeing all of the creativity
that you guys have to offer,
so I'm looking forward to that.
Without further ado,
I'm gonna pass you guys off to you the voiceover.
So as you can see, the theme I decided on for April
was clouds, because April showers, get it?
I didn't wanna actually draw rain,
so I drew the clouds instead.
And this is a theme that has been requested
multiple times, by you guys in the past,
so I finally had the time to do it,
and I thought it would be perfect for April.
So, for the cover page I'm drawing a bunch of clouds,
kinda look like they are drifting along.
I absolutely love the way that this cover page turned out.
I feel like it's a nice mix between
simple and minimal, and detailed,
'cause I know with clouds it can be very easy
just to do the standard typical, you know,
cloud shape that you did when you we're younger,
but I decided to add a little bit more detail in it,
and it gave it a lot of visual interest.
The color that I chose for my accent color,
is this nice faded desaturated grayish blue,
and it is, of course, a Crayola Supertips marker,
you guys know that these markers
are my obsession and my everything,
and they just come in handy so often
when I'm choosing a color for my bullet journal.
Instead of just coloring in these clouds with a solid color,
I decided to use the blue gray marker sparingly,
and just add it as kind of like shadows.
With the line work details that I drew in the clouds,
it made it easy for me to see
where I wanted to put this color, and in the end,
I like how these light washes of color
made the clouds look almost 3D,
and gave it a minimal pop of color.
For the page on the left,
originally I thought I was gonna do a quote page,
but once I started writing it out
I realize I didn't like how it looked,
so I went on to Storyblocks and found
couple pictures of clouds.
There was so so many,
I don't even think I went through all of the pages,
but I downloaded some of my favorites,
the ones that had a dreamy pastel vibe.
I resized them and printed them out,
and then I used these to cover up my mistakes.
And I did sort of a collage with it,
and it was honestly so much fun.
I don't often do collages,
but I actually really like the look of it,
even though it's something a bit different
than what I normally do,
and I'm definitely going to be doing a bit more
of these in the future,
because it's a great way to get creative,
and honestly, I found it fun looking for images,
and finding the perfect ones,
and then printing it out, cutting it out,
it was just a nice hands-on experience,
and I love the pairing of the images that I chose
with the cover page,
I feel like they complement each other very well.
Once I found a layout that I liked,
I stuck it on to the page using my glue tape dispenser,
again I'm gonna link it down below.
This is one of my favorite tools for bullet journaling,
especially for fixing mistakes.
And I decided to play around,
and add some doodles on top of the images,
so I outlined some of the shapes the clouds,
did some line work,
and I think these doodles tied everything together,
especially with the cover page right next to it.
So turning over the page and moving on to my monthly log,
I decided to draw these individual boxes
for my calendar layout,
because I'm going with this floating cloud look.
So I thought these floating boxes would
really complement the whole theme.
As you will see, I had a little bit of a struggle
making this monthly layout for some reason,
it was just one of those days
where I just kept making mistakes.
So you will see how I fix a lot of those mistakes coming up,
I think I was focused on making sure
that the boxes were spaced out right,
and I also wanted to leave some of the lines blank,
just in case I wanted to make the clouds go over it.
So later I realized that April actually starts on a Sunday,
not a Saturday, so I just left the Saturday box blank,
and I'm also missing the very last day of April,
which is the Monday.
So it should technically be one more row, but honestly,
that takes up a lot more space,
so I probably would have done
the same thing even if I had realized,
but basically make sure
you double check your calendars guys.
It was one of those days for me,
but it doesn't have to be for you.
This is a word of warning. (laughs)
So I drew some more clouds,
but this time I drew them,
kind of covering the calendar layout,
so that the calendar looked like it
was a part of the cloud atmosphere.
And I drew the clouds in a border shape,
so it covered the corners,
and I did some in the center as well.
Oh I forgot to say, the grid spacing,
each of the boxes for the calendar is five by five,
with one dot grid space in between each box.
Course I had to finish it off with my YouTube tracker,
in the bottom left there is a perfect space for it,
and then I added in all of my cloud details like normal,
you'll see a lot of that during this video.
As usual, I'll be posting a cloud doodle tutorial
over on my Instagram,
so you guys can learn how I drew these clouds,
but it's pretty simple,
and honestly you guys can simplify it if you prefer.
I finished off my monthly spread,
by writing out April with my
Tombow Fudenosuke hard tip brush pen.
This month I went for more of an elegant look,
with my cursive hand lettering,
for the past couple of months
I've been going with a more quirky cute vibe,
but I thought with the clouds
I wanted something a bit more elegant,
so it's more slanted and more spaced out.
Moving on to my trackers,
these are always my favorite pages to come up with,
because it's a chance for me to really be creative,
and come up with something unique.
So for my mood tracker,
which was my favorite spread this month,
I drew a big rain cloud at the top,
and I'm going to be drawing some rain,
and that's what we're going
to be filling in for the month.
So make sure you space out these lines perfectly,
I made sure I had enough space for 30 of these lines,
because that's how many days there are in April.
I drew different line lengths,
and at the bottom of each line I drew a raindrop,
after that I numbered each raindrop off,
and essentially every single day
I'll be filling in each raindrop,
with a different shade of blue, depending on my mood.
I'm so excited to see this all filled in,
that's probably my favorite part about mood trackers,
is seeing it at the end of the month,
when it is a complete colored in illustration.
For my habit trackers,
I wanted to balance out the mood tracker on the left side,
because the rain did give it kind of a sad vibe,
so I drew a sun peeking out from a cloud,
this time on the bottom of the spread,
and I feel like it was a cool weather themed vibe.
I wrote out the title to mimic the curve of the sun,
and I proceeded to create my individual trackers.
You guys know that this is something
that I've been turned on to over the past couple of months.
Individual trackers truly are the way to go personally,
because I just find that they are a lot easier to look at,
and keep track of everything,
and I find it much more satisfying to fill in,
than what I was doing previously.
So if you haven't tried out individual trackers,
test it out, see what works for you,
you don't like it you can always change it up.
Most tedious part is definitely writing out all the numbers,
but I made it out alive.
Anyways, I actually didn't like
that I colored in the sun that yellow color,
I feel like it was very jarring and it didn't go with it,
so I ended up fixing it,
by tracing out the sun shape on a piece of paper,
and then gluing it over top.
For the next page,
I decided to use more of the images I found on Storyblocks.
They had a ton of these great graphic
illustrations of clouds in various styles,
so I printed off a bunch of them in different sizes,
and cut them all out,
and I decided to place them all along the top,
and make it look like they were hanging
from the top of the page.
I always read comments on my videos,
from people saying that they're not that great of an artist,
or they don't want to spend too much time drawing,
so using graphics like these
can be a great solution to that.
You can print out a bunch of them beforehand,
and carry them in the back pocket of the notebook,
so when you want to add a little decoration
to your bullet journal,
you can just whip them out and glue them right on.
As I mentioned,
I drew lines straight up from each of the cloud,
to make them look like they were hanging,
and I actually ended up using
the quote that I scrapped earlier,
which was, "Head in the clouds feet on the ground",
and it is going to be a nice the journaling page for me,
to just write out and spew all of my thoughts.
The next page that I am currently setting up right now,
is my video planner spread.
Similar to my monthly layout,
I went with these cloud borders.
I feel like they are very mystical and magical,
and make it look like it's a dream, almost.
So definitely expect to see this motif
come up a lot in my future weekly spreads.
For the page next to it, I decided to do my budget planner.
last month I tried out doing individual budget planners,
where I categorize each of my expenses,
and track my expenses that way,
instead of doing it all in one,
and I actually really really liked it.
It was cool for me to see where I was spending my money,
how much I was spending it, on what,
so I did a pretty similar layout,
obviously just with a different design.
I made it look like the clouds
are holding up each of these sheets of paper,
with my budgets on them,
and on each of the budgets I sectioned it off,
from week one, week two, week three, and week four.
Some of the different categories that I have,
are rent and utilities, groceries, household stuff,
restaurants, entertainment, and shopping.
Later, I actually ended up setting a budget
for each of these categories,
so I could have a goal as to how much I wanted
to spend for each of them, and try to stay under it.
I really liked how these clouds holding
up the paper and looked,
so I decided to carry that over
into my very first weekly spread for a month,
and I drew longer rectangles,
and this time I drew them different heights,
and at different locations to make them look more floaty.
I don't even know if floaty is a word,
but you guys get what I mean.
And then of course, I drew the clouds over top of each one,
and connected them, to make it look like they were attached.
If you we're wondering about the grid spacing,
each of these boxes are about eight dot spaces wide,
with one dot space in between.
I've been trying to remember to let you guys know,
about the dot spacing,
because I know that some of you guys find it useful,
and I know that when you're setting up your spread,
that can be the most confusing part,
is making sure all of the boxes and lengths,
and everything is the right height and width.
But anyways, I used a thicker fine liner
to write out the days of the week,
just to make it stand out inside of cloud,
and then I drew a circle with my Supertips marker
to write out the number.
Is it really a spread of mine without some drop shadows?
I feel like we've been missing the drop shadows recently,
so I did little subtle ones behind the papers,
and I also split up each of the boxes
for events at the top, and tasks at the bottom.
There was some blank space in the top right,
so I doodled a paper airplane flying in from the corner,
and I love the way it turned out.
Anyways here's the final look
at my April 2018 bullet journal setup.
I really like this one in particular,
because it is a bit different from my past ones.
So let me know what you guys think of this month
in the comments below.
Alright everyone, so that's a wrap
on my April plan with me and bullet journal setup,
I hope you enjoyed hanging out with me.
If you recreate any of my spreads
you can tag me on Instagram @AMANDARACHDOODLES,
I can't wait to see them.
Again thanks to Storyblocks for sponsoring this video,
make sure you check out the link in the description box,
if you want to save on an annual subscription.
But that's pretty much it, so keep doodling,
and I'll talk to you guys later, bye everyone.
(upbeat music)