It’s that time of year: time for a mid-year bullet journal migration. I decided to leave my older layouts in the old bullet journal (that I set up in March – you can check it out here). To keep the videos short, I published 2 YouTube videos, one showing the hand lettered dashboard and the second showing the layouts I created for my mid-year bullet journal migration. I thought it would be fun to try using watercolors to decorate my layouts and I love how it turned out. Scroll down for some tips and tricks.
Bullet Journal Migration Supplies
- 160 GSM Scribbles That Matter bullet journal
- Tombow Mono Drawing Pens in sizes 01, 03, and 05
- Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pen in Grey
- Crayola Supertips
- Art Philosophy Tropicals Watercolor Palette
- Artist’s Loft Watercolor Paint Brushes
- Gelly Roll in size 08
Watercoloring Tips and Tricks
Let’s address the elephant in the room: putting water in your planner or bullet journal is super scary so let’s be very clear! I am using a 160 GSM notebook. This means that the paper is thicker and holds up to some water saturation more so than majority of other bullet journals or other planners out there. For bullet journals, you’re going to want to stick to an Archer and Olive or a Scribbles That Matter.
Now, even though these pages are designed to hold watercolor, you still don’t want to go overboard when adding water. When needing to add more water, I would do so after the initial layer had dried.
With that said though, the best way to watercolor in your bullet journal and avoid over saturation is to work fast. For blending out to create a lighter section, you have to move fast. Otherwise you just end up using more water. In my example above, when I added more color, it was to add shadowing so I wasn’t using as much water.
I really enjoyed working with the watercolors in my bullet journal. The blending and effects the interacting colors created was a lot of fun to see. I will definitely be doing future layouts and lettering projects with the paints. I hope this inspires you to give it a try too.
As always, please reach out with any questions or comments and I will do my best to help!
Talk soon!
