I’ve had a ton of amazing comments and questions about my English Literature Bullet Journal Library. I did record some of the process, namely the more tangible skills I used. And by skills I mean, drawing and colouring in. I am still working on my colouring techniques so this layout was a lot of fun to practice shading.You can find the video here, where I discuss what techniques I used and why I used them. In this blog post, you will find the supplies and a few tips and tricks that I used when creating this layout.
Supplies
In recent weeks, I’ve added some new “essentials” to my bullet journal family; namely a circle stencil and a couple of grid rulers (in different sizes). But otherwise, I use my favorite basic supplies:
- Pencil, ruler, and eraser
- Assortment of black pens:
- Tombow Mono Drawing Pens in sizes 03 and 05
- Inkjoy black gel pen
- Papermate Flair pen in black
- Prismacolor Pencil Set
- Prismacolor Blending Pencil
- Westcott 6-inch grid ruler
- Pickett Circle Stencil (for decorating the spines of the books)
- Prismacolor Kneaded Rubber Eraser for small mistakes
- Mini Distress Inks:
- Faded Jeans and Chipped Sapphire (Monday)
- Rusty Hinge and Wild Honey (Tuesday)
- Wilted Violet and Dusty Concord (Wednesday)
- Walnut Stain and Ground Espresso (Thursday)
- Peeled Paint and Forest Moss (Friday)
- Fired Brick and Aged Mahogany (Saturday)
- Victorian Velvet and Miller Lavender (Sunday)
- Pumice Stone and Frayed Burlap (Next Week)
Tips and Tricks
- I learned a lot from my Crayola layout from the week before. Biggest lesson was that not all pens work on the waxy surface created by blended pencils. This was the biggest reason for the variation in pens. The Tombow Drawing pens and Flairs don’t work. You will get a feint line and the Drawing pens will pick up some of the wax and not work as well. The Flairs will pick up the wax and not work at all. Therefore, I used an Inkjoy pen in the coloured spines.
- The Flair was great for using on the September heading and the “Eng. Literature” since I could colour and blend over it without it smudging. The Drawing pens will smudge. There is some fading but fixable by going over the letters with the Flair again.
- The Prismacolor kneaded eraser is great for grabbing small little errors. Any where I coloured over a line or blended over a line, I was able to clean it up/lighten it a bit by using the kneaded eraser.
- The circle stencil was great for creating spines. There are markings around the circles that help you to line up the circles how you want and still make it even. I was SO exited to find it.
- I strongly recommend a blending pencil. It smooths out the coloring lines and makes it look more “finished”. I use my pencil so much that it doesn’t last very long, so having the pencil extender is great as I can use it until the very end.
- When blending different colors, I make sure to sharpen and clean my pencil in between switching colours. By clean I mean just coloring on a scrap piece of paper to remove left over colour. Otherwise the colour will rub off and could ruin the element.
Final Thoughts
I am very happy with how this layout turned out. I even hesitated filling out my schedule for the week since I didn’t want to ruin it :P. It’s been a lot of fun using the Quirky Heart Digest prompts to create these more artistic layouts. I also get to use my supplies – if you’ve got it, USE IT! That’s my new motto :). With all this said, the layout definitely has its errors, namely there is no September 31st. I also feel as though I rushed the lettering on the books when writing the authors’ names.But I feel that imperfections make everything seem more real.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any additional comments or questions. I will answer them best I can. Thank you for reading and thank you for watching. I appreciate the support a lot!
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