PLAN WITH ME | August 2021 Bullet Journal Setup
(upbeat music) - Thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring today's video. I have my friend here. Hi, guys, it's Amanda, welcome back to my channel.
Today we are doing my, oh my God, I literally have a brain fart, what month are we in? August, 2021 bullet journal setup and Plan With Me. Oh my God. As you can see, I am back in Toronto right now. If you have been following along via social media slash also, if you remember my last Plan With Me, I was in Vancouver, I filmed outside and everything, and it was a great time. I thought I was gonna stay longer, but I ended up having some things to settle back here in Toronto, so we're back in the familiar place. These Plan with Me videos are kind of like my monthly check-ins with you guys.
I feel like I give life update sometimes as well. So this month is a little bit busier than normal. As some of you may know, I'm working on the 2022 doodle planner, as well as some other fun, exciting things. So I will definitely be needing a good bullet journal setup to help me organize all of that. And besides all of that, I have been focusing on making the most of my summer. Summer only lasts like two months in Toronto.
So I have to make the best use of this nice weather and the sunlight while I can, With that being said, I have a really, really fun idea for this month's bullet journal setup. I'm really excited to show you guys. So if you're planning along with me, grab your notebooks, Washi tapes. Oh, I feel like I'm all over the place in this intro. We are restocking all of the Washi tape fun Shop AmandaRachLee soon. So for all of you guys who have been asking, those will be dropping on this date, we're also having a huge notebook clearance sale.
I think the sales is gonna be pretty big, along with the restock. So just in case you guys are curious, that's happening, but anyway, grab all of your stationary. If you're just hanging out with me, I don't know, get a snack, get a drink and let's get started. Okay, so for my August, 2021 bullet journal theme, I think a lot of you guys are going to be very excited for this one because I was actually inspired by Olivia Rodrigo's Sour album, who I'm sure many of you guys probably know. If you don't know she's a singer and she's just been blowing up recently, topping the charts, all of that.
But her team was actually nice enough to gift me some of her merchandise. They gave me a hoodie and then also they gave me this journal that I was inspired by. In the journal that they gave me, it actually included some of Olivia's thoughts and doodles relating to the songs and the album and it looked very much so like her own personal journal or diary, it was very scrapbooky and it had a lot of the stickers similar to the stickers that she's been showing on her album artwork and throughout the promotions. I feel like, I mean, in general, the songs and the promotions are very nineties nostalgia, inspired both in terms of the song genres as well as the design. And of course, I feel like everyone loves nineties nostalgia. I think it's been a thing for awhile.
Definitely more present lately because everyone, I think just wants to go back to those times. I love a good nineties moment. Even if you're not an Olivia Rodrigo fan, don't worry. This theme, I feel like can be applicable to a lot of different people and can be altered. For my cover page, I got inspired by the actual cover of that Sour journal that they gave me and I wanted to recreate it for August because I thought it was pretty cool.
It basically just looks like a composition notebook that she would get for school. And it had a bunch of stickers all over it. Of course, with those magazine style letters as the title on the front. I thought it'd be cute for a theme because also I know school is starting for some people soon. So, you know, composition notebook fits with the back to school vibe as well. As you guys will see throughout this setup.
I actually did very little drawing in this setup and this month, I mostly focused on recreating that journaly childhood diary, nineties aesthetic of the Olivia Rodrigo journal, because it actually gave me a lot of inspiration. The pages on the inside, as I was flipping through and reading through some of her thoughts, I thought it was really cute the way they had designed it. And I felt really inspired after looking through it.
And of course, you know, it also gave me an excuse to use a bunch of these stickers and stationary, that I normally wouldn't be able to use because as you guys know, I am a stationary hoarder, so I've definitely collected a bunch of stickers over the years. I keep them inside of this really thick folder for easy access. And normally I reserved them for personal use, like sending cards or pen pal letters, mostly because my bullet journal themes usually include drawing and not that many stickers, but because of that, my sticker collection has started to grow a little bit.
So this theme came at a perfect time. It gave me a reason to slim down my sticker collection and also just go crazy with stickers. While I was making this set up, I was actually having so much fun. And I think it's because this theme really satisfied my inner child. I mean, who doesn't like sticking stickers everywhere.
I feel like you can't be sad while sticking star and happy face stickers all over a page. Actually, I feel like stickers were kind of like the gateway to my stationary obsession as a child. I remember having a sticker book and collecting stickers in a little hello kitty case with different sticker sheets. There was puffy ones and fluffy stickers as well.
And who would have thought that I would still essentially be doing the same thing as a twenty-three year old, collecting stickers. And now I run a whole stationary business as well. So, clearly that little sticker collection I had as a child led me to this point. But I think there is something special about allowing yourself to do the things that your inner child loves or wants as an adult. And I hope you all take some time to do something that allows you to release your inner child as well, because this theme was very much so that for me. I feel like I always ramble on these voiceovers, but for the cover page, quickly gonna run through it 'cause you guys probably saw what I was doing anyway.
I wanted to create those for magazine style letters on some white paper, just to mimic the sour lettering that she used a lot in the album and in that journal. So I did that by writing out each letter in a different font on white paper, cutting them out. And then of course I just went crazy and stuck stickers everywhere.
I will try to list where some of my stickers are from, but I might not know where all of them are from, because this is just a result of years of collecting stickers. I did also use this pair of curved tweezers to place my stickers, which is something that I've seen a lot of K-pop collectors doing. And I think it's actually quite smart for sticker placement because you can see where you want them.
You can kind of hover over it. And also, you know, especially for the really tiny stickers, it's helpful for peeling them off of the page. So I will link those don't down below as well. On the other side of the page, I created a quote page slash scrapbook page. I actually included a Polaroid picture from the doodle team magazine photo shoot, as well as a quote that I decided to go with. And this quote is actually a lyric from one of Olivia Rodrigo songs, Good for You.
If the original lyrics say good for you, you look happy and healthy, but I changed it to good for me. I'm happy and healthy, because I am, so what a blessing. I feel like it will kind of act as an affirmation this month, to remind myself of that bigger picture of what I should be grateful for, which is just that I'm happy and healthy.
So yeah, so that's my quote page. I think this spread turned out so cute. I love the scrapbooky aspect of it and, you know, ripping papers and sticking stickers all over it.
And again, super simple to recreate because there's no drawing, you're essentially just putting whatever stickers you have in your collection on top. However, I do recognize that not everyone is as excessive as I am, in terms of owning stickers. So what you could do, alternatively, if you don't have a lot of stickers in your collection, is to actually draw a lot of like doodles, like stars and smiley faces and whatnot, cut them out and stick them in your bullet journal. And it'll kind of mimic the look of stickers. So that's a little tip for you guys in case you don't have that many stickers on hand, but you wanna get the look of this theme.
(soft upbeat music) for the calendar spread, I used this pad of purple paper that I had, it's from BT 21. I also use some black paper, some lined paper that I had, as well as grid paper. Again, besides, you know, me getting inspiration from Olivia Rodrigo's album.
I feel like the secondary theme to this setup was me using stationary that I don't get to use as often. So I use a lot of scrap papers that I had around, ripped it up, and I feel like the black and purple really went with the color scheme that the album has. So that's what I went with. I really wanted the spreads to look like the inside of a notebook. So I did use a lot of lined paper just because the cover page, you know, is a composition notebook cover.
So it'll be like an actual cover of a notebook. And then the inside or the pages of the notebook, it's kind of meta. But anyway, the whole calendar spread is the purple lined paper that I pasted on. And I just drew the horizontal lines to divide out the rows in the calendar.
I actually didn't bother too much with vertical lines, just because I feel like it kind of went with the more chill, hand drawn vibe of this setup. I added the grid paper and black paper as well as stickers in the corner and all over it to decorate it. And since there was a lot of space and colors going on in the spread between the stickers and the doodles and everything, I thought that doing the magazine letters on black paper for this one would make it stand out more. So I did the same thing with writing out the individual letters in different fonts, except I just used a white gel pen on the black paper.
Cut that out and there you go. A pretty simple monthly calendar spread. Sorry for the interruption, before we move on, I wanted to quickly talk about today's sponsor, Skillshare. You guys know how I feel about Skillshare. If you don't know what Skillshare is, there an online learning platform with thousands of classes in illustration, design, technology, drawing, journaling. I do have a couple of exclusive Skillshare classes on there as well.
If you want to see more content for me, in sort of a longer form, more workshop style, then that's definitely the platform to do it. And besides all of the premium content and amazing classes that you get on there, there are some really, really cool teachers on Skillshare. I really love the community aspect of it.
It just encourages you to stay curious, keep learning, and you can connect with other people who are taking the class. You can see the projects that people are doing. It's just a really, really wholesome, amazing learning environment, which I love. It makes me excited to learn, especially when I take classes that I wouldn't normally get to take in real life. You know, there's no ads on the classes, so you can stay focused and they're always launching new premium classes on there.
So there's always something to discover and you can keep growing. Since I've been doing a lot of product design stuff for Shop AmandaRachLee recently, I've been taking a class called Mastering Illustrator by DKNG Studios. I'm decently well versed in illustrator and different programs, but I definitely just wanted to expand my knowledge more and keep myself learning in order to make my workflow more efficient. So that's why I always keep myself learning. Even if it's on a topic that I am technically already good at. So that's a class that I'm currently taking, but there's a ton of their classes if you guys are interested, though, if you click the link in description box down below, the first thousand people will get 30% off their annual subscription.
And if you've already taken advantage of a free trial on Skillshare, you can still use that link. So I think it's a pretty good deal for all of that knowledge, clicking that link also supports my channels. So I appreciate you if you do, and thank you again to Skillshare, without further ado, let's move on. Onto my habit and mood trackers. I'm starting out by ripping some of that lined paper. This is gonna act as a divider between the habit and mood trackers, because I'm putting the habit tracker along the top half and then the mood tracker along the bottom half.
So I thought this would act as a nice, subtle divider slash border for the two. So I just used my glue tape roller to glue that in. And I also ripped some black paper, which I used as a header for the top title. I'm using my paper cutter in the next step so here's some paper cutting ASMR for you.
I hope you enjoyed that mini ASMR segment. I'm not sure if anyone else finds the sound of paper cutting extremely satisfying, but I definitely do. Anyway, what I was cutting with the paper cutter were these small white paper rectangles. As you can see, I place them down and I'm trying to recreate the look of Polaroids. So these are going to be where my individual habit trackers are for this month.
I pasted them, kind of scattered them so it would look more scrapbooky. And then I just use my black pen to create the inside a Polaroid border. And I also, that's where I drew the mini calendars as well. I kind of free handed them this month. So that's why they look a little bit janky. But honestly, I feel like that goes with the theme anyway.
And I added a drop shadow to the Polaroids just to make them stand out more and look more like an actual Polaroid. Underneath each tracker on the actual, you know, fake Polaroid is where I'm labeling the habits that I'm wanting to track. And I'm using these letter alphabet stickers that I got from a super cute Korean sticker store. I actually recently bought a bunch of cute Japanese and Korean stationary.
So maybe I'll do a haul for you guys soon, if you guys want that to see where I get my stickers from and all of that, but I just alternated between the purple ones and the black ones, just to stick with the theme. For the title, I created those same full magazine style letters by writing out habit tracker in a lot of different fonts with the letters. And then I just cut those out and place them on top of the black paper.
I feel like the black paper really made those magazine letters stand out. So I was very happy with that. Once I had the main portions of the tracker complete, I just filled in any empty spaces with some decorative stickers. (slow upbeat music) I got this really cute whole punch that punches out holes in the shape of a flower. So I wanted to test that out. I did that on the purple paper and just ripped it out for the bottom corner, which is where I put the title of the mood tracker.
And this time I wrote out the letters of mood on some black paper, just to make it stand out a little bit more and also to differentiate it from the habit tracker up top. For this mood tracker, I really wanted to do something fun. So I wrote out all of the numbers of the month scattered on that bottom half. And I'm using my stickers as the mood index.
I had a lot of these star stickers. I actually got them for a photo shoot, which is why I have so many of them. And I'm using them up a lot in this theme, but each color of the star sticker will represent a different mood. And on each day I'll place the sticker on top of the number.
So it kind of takes me back to my, you know, childhood days in school, when the teacher would give you a sticker or something. So you guys can use various stickers. It doesn't have to be star stickers.
How cute would it be if you had like smiley face stickers and sad stickers just to represent different moods, but yeah, those are my trackers. And moving on to my next spread, which is my playlist spread. As usual, my monthly playlist of songs that I've been loving is going to be linked down below, so I'm not gonna list out everything. For this, I did get a lot of inspiration from the inside of that Olivia Rodrigo journal, where she was just kind of writing out her thoughts of writing each song on the album. So I literally just stuck the lined purple paper down.
I had some like ripped grid paper that I added on the bottom, just for extra decoration, of course, added like Washi tapes stickers, did some block letters because I feel like as a child, I really liked drawing block letters. For some reason, it was like my biggest flex, was being able to do block letters. So I did that again here, but in terms of the actual list of songs, as you can see, I actually wrote it out pretty loosely, just hand written, almost so that it would look like a list of songs that you would fold up and passes a note to a friend during a class or something.
Anyway, so that's my playlist spread. Again, I'll link my playlist down below if you're curious as to what I'm listening to, of course I had to include my favorite Olivia Rodriguez song, which is Brutal. I have BTS, Permission to Dance, Sam Kim. Oh and I've been listening to a lot of like eighties, Japanese city pop this summer, which has been very summery and fun. So I will link my playlist down below and my Spotify, but moving on to the next spread, which is just a fun little quote scrapbook page.
Honestly, I might do a lot of these this month because it's just so much fun to make. So for this quote page, I just again did a lyric from a Olivia Rodrigo song, my favorite one, which is Brutal. The lyrics of the song say, God, it's brutal out here, which is so teen angst. It definitely goes with the teen childhood diary vibes that we have going on here. I mean, I definitely had some dirt journals and diaries as an angsty tween where I was just so angry at the world and I thought everything revolved around me, everything was dramatic, but it's just so funny to look back on those now and see what I was concerned with at the time, especially now, that things are so different as an adult. I actually still have quite a lot of those childhood journals and diaries still.
And I've been contemplating whether I wanna show you guys some of them in a future video, but it is a little bit embarrassing. So we'll see, we'll see. But honestly, with this spread, I didn't really have a plan going into it. I just went with the flow, stuck stickers everywhere. I had an extra Polaroid that I Washi taped in as well and used some of my favorite cute stickers, had some butterflies, some dinosaurs, really just going at it. I also doodled a bunch, like adding doodles around the letters and underlining things and adding smiley faces, all of that, whatever you want to add, go for it.
Finally, we have made it to the first weekly spread of August. And for this weekly spread, I'm doing one of my favorite layouts. You guys should know this by now.
It's the layout with the four boxes on each page. So four columns, two rows. And for this spread, I actually, I feel like I kept things pretty simple.
I mean, I know when I say simple, it's objective really very different from some people's simple. We talk about this a lot on my Twitch live streams, where I do my weekly spreads. I suffer from this thing where I have a too much gene.
It just comes out, I just can't keep things simple. Even if I try, it's just too much fun to doodle and decorate things, okay. But you know, I think that's okay. All things considered, this weekly spread was actually pretty quick and easy to make. I just ripped out the pieces of paper in the measurements of the boxes. So I was using the purple paper, the white lined paper, black paper.
And after that, I just used my alphabet stickers to label the days and filled in the empty spaces with the rest of my stickers. What I love about this theme, is that even though it looks like a lot is happening and it looks like it took so much time, it's actually super quick to make, because as you saw, I wasn't drawing anything. I was mostly just gluing stuff in and using my stickers to fill in the rest of these spaces.
So, oh, also I feel like, I mean, you can't really mess up sticker placement because you can kind of add them in chaotically and just, you know, say that it was your intention. All right guys. So here's final flip through of my August, 2021, Olivia Rodrigo sour inspired bullet journal setup.
I love the way this setup turned out and above all else. Honestly, it was just super fun and therapeutic to make. So I can't wait to see you guys as recreation's, but let me know what you guys think of these spreads. All right, guys.
So that was it for my August Plan With Me and bullet journal setup. I hope you guys enjoyed this month set up. I feel like it was a pretty fun one.
As usual, I'm showcasing your recreation's from last month over here. Look at them, in all its glory. If you do recreate my bullet journal, you can tag me on social media at AmandaRachLee, whether it be Instagram or Tik Tok, I've actually been watching a lot of you guys recreate my things on Tik ToK recently, it's very entertaining to me. So I will be lurking on there.
And besides that, if you wanna see how the rest of my weekly spreads turn out, I do weekly live streams every Saturday at 11:00 AM Eastern time on my Twitch stream. I love doing those live streams 'cause it's real time. So you guys get to really see the process of how I come up with spreads, like my thinking process and how I fix mistakes. And it's also a nice way for me to chat with you guys and keep up with all of you. So come hang out on a Twitch live stream if you want. I think that's pretty much it.
So thank you guys so, so much for watching, keep doodling and I will talk to you in the next one. Bye guys. (upbeat music)
2021-07-29 18:55
