Below the flip-through video, you’ll see time stamps for different themes and a description of how the theme came about.
Make sure you check out my review of the Archer & Olive journal (reviews of both 2019 and 2023 versions). This premium journal is worth the money and new updates just keep improving in quality.
00:39 October – Goth dolls
Zebra Mildliners
Tombow dual brush pens
Uni-Ball Signo white gel pen
In October 2020 I started a new journal, using an Archer and Olive notebook and for the first time a journal with 160gsm paper. I was so excited to be able to colour in with my Tombow brush markers and not have any ghosting that I made the theme all about markers! I’d seen a few cute gothic style dolls on Pinterest while looking for Halloween style pictures and I was also quite keen to try a theme that was restricted to greyscale, especially after using so much colour in September.
1:11 November – 3D and zentangle
Prismacolor coloured pencils
Pigma Micron pens
Fudenosuke brush pen
This theme ended up being a bit confused, but the intention was to create a series of 3D drawings. I tried to incorporate different types of 3D lettering as well, and then to add interest I also included zentangle. I love some of the 3D drawings – the effect is impressive. The best effects were in the title page and the spider on the cleaning tracker.
1:58 December – Penguins
Pigma Micron pens
Reeves watercolours
Winsor & Newton gouache
Winsor & Newton professional watercolors
Washi tape
Stamps
Fudenosuke brush pen
I had a wonderful set of Christmas themed penguin stamps, so my theme for December was destined to be penguins. I decided to paint a different species of penguin on each spread. To get a better result with the professional grade watercolours, I did a couple of the paintings on proper watercolour paper and then stuck them in. I really loved this theme. This was also the first month I didn’t do weeklies in favour of doing daily logs. For my daily logs I used one stamp each day I recorded something in my journal.
4:23 January – Lighthouses
Pigma Micron pens
Prismacolor coloured pencils
Reeves watercolours
Zebra Mildliners
Tombow dual brush pens
Uni-Ball Signo white gel pen
Chameleon pens
New year, continuing an existing journal. I wanted to have something bright and positive for the new year and I adore painting lighthouses, so this became my theme. I was still using dailies rather than weeklies, so there weren’t a lot of shareable spreads. I particularly like the mental health spread, which was a new move for the new year. You can read about what went into its development here.
5:34 February – Australian children’s literature classics
Pigma Micron pens
Reeves watercolours
I loved this theme. I had been thinking about drawing Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs, and then realised that a lot of Australian classic children’s stories had beautiful illustrations, so my theme was decided. I used watercolours to colour in penned outlines. I was especially proud of my dutch doors spread where Snugglepot looks different on each side of the same page.
6:40 March – Animorphs
Pigma Micron pens
Prismacolor coloured pencils
Tombow dual brush pens
I started with the idea of centaurs, part human part horse, but didn’t like the idea of drawing people so opted instead to do morphs of two different animals. The hardest thing was choosing animals to morph that worked together. This involved choosing animals that had a similar shape at some point on their body so they’d ‘fit’. March also saw a return to using weeklies because I’d become quite irregular with my dailies and wasn’t getting tasks done. I used coloured pencils for the drawings and for the first time used one font throughout the whole month. Not only does this improve the visual consistency between the spreads, it also saves you time when preparing your spreads, partly because you don’t have to search for fonts, and partly because you begin to be able to draw the font without your reference guide.
8:06 April – Art Deco posters
Pigma Micron pens
Prismacolor coloured pencils
Reeves watercolours
Pitt Artist brush pen
Tombow dual brush pens
I only had a few pages left in my Archer and Olive journal and almost started a new one until I remembered that I was going to be on holidays for two weeks and probably wouldn’t be using my journal too much during April. I decided to do condensed spreads and forgo my usual tracker spreads so I could use up the pages left in this journal and managed to use every single last page. I started out wanting to do an art deco theme, but it only took a little research to discover the wonderful posters from the art deco period, so decided to concentrate just on those. I reproduced posters from musicals, movies and albums and once again kept my font consistent.