Carpe Diem Planner Set up | July 2016 - Bullet Journal Style

PICTURE HEAVY POST

Hello, everyone and a very, very good morning to all of you! 

It's a new month and that means I have a new set up in my planner. For the past few months, I've been using the same layout and techniques to decorate my planner. So I thought that this month I would do something different.

My source of inspiration for this month's decoration style is Bullet Journaling and how simple, easy and colourful the whole idea is. So I decided to ditch the stamps and inks, picked up my Faber Castell colour pencils, a few Colourful Ball point pens by Camlin (locally purchased), a ruler and a black gel pen, and got to work. I hope you can see from my list of supplies that to do this, you don't even need a planner - just a notebook and the rest of the stuff.

I'm so excited to share this with you! :D :D

So I first got my supplies together. As you can see in the image below, it's not too much.

I bought these Camlin Colour Pens last month and I really wanted to put them to good use, so most of my decoration colours are based on the colours of the pens available.

As for the Watercolour pencils, I wanted to use Tombow Dual Brush Markers for colouring, but when I tried it on a sample page, it bled through. Watercolours also bled through. So I settled for colour pencils and trust me, they're more than enough :) 

Decorating the Monthly Spread

I loved the date-banners I saw on most of the Bullet Journals on Instagram, so I decided to do those for my monthly spread. I first made pencil marks - 1cm vertically and horizontally (so the banners are all 1 cm x 1 cm) and then drew the banners directly using that gel pen you see in the picture (that costs 5 rupees only, by the way.) I gave it a minute to dry off before I erased the pencil marks.

The next step was to colour the banners in. I decided to do the weekdays in Green and weekends in Blue.

Then I wrote the dates with my Smash Pen because the gel pen wouldn't work over the colouring as well as I wanted it to. And for good measure, I added some dash-lines over the banners to make it look like they'd been stitched :D

Here's a close-up.

Then, all I had to do was fill in the details. I added a few Carpe Diem stickers and washi tape too.

Decorating Weekly Pages

For this month, I not only changed the tools I used, I also changed the layout of my weekly pages. For this month, I divided each day's section into almost equal halves.

I want to use the left side of each day to do some journaling - write about how my day was, what I did, etc.

The To-Do list moved to the right side and I got rid of the "Due Today" section altogether. I decided to use the monthly page for that.

In this new layout, I have also moved my Water-tracker to the 'Notes' section of the week, added a few more things in there that I need to track and not recorded the FMSPhotoaDay prompts at all (but that was because when I was decorating the pages I wasn't too keen on doing the PhotoaDay challenge this month. I have been posting for the last 2 days though :P)

I also did something fun for each week. Similar to what I did for June, I picked three colours for each week. I also made shaped checkboxes. What I did diffrently was that my dates were inside shapes too. Let me show you what I'm saying.

Week 1

> First, the colours: I picked three (out of the eight choices I had) of my Camlin Pens and co-ordinating colour pencils in a light and dark shade (so six colour pencils).

> I then drew the separator using a Grey Colour Pencil.

> Next, I decided on a shape - Square for this month. I drew the big Squares for the dates and smaller ones for the checkboxes.

> I  then coloured them in - ALL of them :)

> Next, I wrote the "Today" on the left hand section in the same colour as the Date. When I do the journaling, I will do that with a black pen, so there's balance :)

> Lastly, I made the Tracker in the Notes Section. I'm on certain medication, so apart from my water intake, I need to track those.

So every week, the layout is the same. The only difference is the colours and the shapes.

Take a look at Week 1.

Week 2

For this week, I made banners :)

Week 3

This week, I made circles.

Week 4

And for this last week, I made Bunting :D

Obviously, decorating this was so much fun!! I'm going to have fun writing in these pages. If I remember to do so, I will share finished pages soon too. :) :)

That's all I have for you today. I'll be back on Sunday with a New Old Project :P

Till then,

Have a great rest-of-the-week! :)

Love,

Nikita.