Bullet Journals are the best thing to help you get a handle on your to-do list, help you relax, and give you an outlet for your creativity.
Unlike the lined filled diary of our youth, the bullet journal contains sections to log your to-do list, keep a monthly or weekly calendar, jot notes, track your health, and record your goals.
Why You Should Doodle in Your Bullet Journal
Doodles offer so much to your bullet journal experience. They are a great way to decorate and personalize your bullet journal, but they also help a lot with your mental health in the following ways.
Reconnect with Your Emotions
Like any form of art, doodling is very connected to your emotional state and can positively influence your mood.
Doodling helps the mind slow down, which leads to stress and anxiety release.
Since bullet journaling is supposed to help us become more mindful in our daily lives, doodling is a huge benefit to that.
Helps with Problem Solving
When you are doodling, your brain is engaged to being active, but not to the point of being stuck on one thought.
This can help you come up with new solutions and work through problems. Think about how often you were doodling while you worked through a difficult question on a test in school.
For many people, doodling comes naturally when they are faced with a problem.
Keeps You Awake
When you are doodling, your brain stays active and engaged in the subject that you have lost focus on. Many studies have proven that doodling can help people stay focused, grasp new concepts, and retain information. By incorporating doodling into your daily bullet journaling, you are helping your brain remember the importance of what you are writing in your journal.
Best Tools and Supplies for Doodles
Before you get started with doodling, you want to ensure that you have the supplies you will need.
The right supplies will decrease frustration as you are learning how to doodle. The supplies that work best for you might be different than what works best for someone else.
The quality of supplies can also vary greatly from one brand to another. The best thing to do is not to spend a lot of money on your supplies upfront.
As you progress through your bullet journaling and doodling, you can upgrade your supplies to make sure they are the ones that best suit your style.
Dual Tipped Colored Pens
Colored pens allow you to add a pop of color to your doodle art. This also allows you to make things pop off the page if you want them to catch your attention. By choosing pens that are dual tipped, you can decide to make your lines thin, or thick.
Colored Pencils
When you want to color in your doodles, you don’t want all the color to bleed or run. Colored pencils allow you to add color to your doodles while giving you the flexibility to play with how light or dark the color appears.
Fine Tip Drawing Pen
A fine tip drawing pen will enable you to doodle and see the details in the art that you have created. If a pen is too thick, the details in your doodles will be crammed together and seem smudged and messy.
Where to Get Ideas for Bullet Journaling
We will look at some of the best doodling ideas, tutorials, and printables for bullet journaling. However, if you find yourself looking for something specific, there are places to search for the results you want.
We all know that you can find everything on Pinterest. A quick Pinterest search for the specific doodle you are looking for will bring up tutorials and images pretty instantly.
YouTube
If you prefer to watch a video of someone showing you how to draw something, YouTube is a great resource. Chances are, someone has published a video of the doodle you are looking for, and it not, you can likely find something similar and extrapolate your image from there.
People who use bullet journals often post their journals to Instagram.
Checking out some of the ideas posted to Instagram can inspire you how you want your pages to look.
Remember, only use other people’s ideas as inspiration instead of a measuring stick for your bullet journal.
Your bullet journal reflects you, not anyone else.
While you might believe that you don’t have the ability to draw, the truth is that anyone can make beautiful doodles with some practice.
Especially if you are using the right tutorials.
Best Bullet Journal Doodles
Some of the best bullet journal doodles are the ones that make your page pop!
These doodles are ones that emphasize the corners, borders, and titles in your bullet journal.
Corner Doodles
When you use corner doodles, you can make sections of your bullet journal stand out from the rest of the page. You can put corner doodles in all the corners of your pages or place them just around the most important thing on the page. The link here has basic and more complicated designs that you can use to add corners to your bullet journal.
Image credit: Instagram/nicolegracestudies
Border & Frame Doodles
Border doodles add a great aesthetic look to your bullet journal. You can use border doodles around the entire page, around one section of a page, or even as lines across the page to break up different sections of your journal without bordering off a whole part.
Image credit: Pinterest/bydawnnicole
Title Doodles
When you are writing the title on your bullet journal page, you don’t want just a plain title. You want something that is going to call attention to just how important the title is. Using title doodles is the equivalent of using different fonts when you are putting together a digital presentation.
Floral Doodles
Floral doodles are a favorite in the bullet journal world. They are simple, they are elegant, and they can be used in many different ways.
Image Credit: Pinterest/Beautiful Dawn Designs
Hand Lettering Doodles
Another option for looking for different ways to write the titles in your bullet journal is this video. In this video, there are fifty different ways to write the word “Hello” you can use these writing styles for any of the titles that you use in your journal to brighten up a page, add something unique, or even match your mood.
Image Credit: Tumblr
Best Bullet Journal Doodling Tutorials
If you are learning to doodle and have no experience, these tutorials are a great place to start. They will break down how to doodle in ways that are easy to mimic and master.
How to Doodle Tutorial
In this video, the shapes of doodles are broken down to their most basic. This is especially helpful if you feel that you cannot draw even the most basic shapes. Once you have mastered the basic shapes of doodling, you will be better prepared to master some of the more complicated options.
Easy Simple Doodles
If you were looking for a YouTube video that shows many different simple doodles, this video is a great option. From fruits, vehicles, and fish to flowers, mason jars, and animals. You can learn how to draw many different things.
Three-Step Doodle Tutorial
Three-step doodles are a great place to start on your doodling journey. When these simple images are broken into three easy steps, they are less overwhelming and easy to mimic. You can add your own details to the three-step tutorials that are listed here.
Image Credit: The Petite Planner
Ribbon Banners Tutorial
Another way to add pizazz to your bullet journal is through ribbon banners. You can use ribbon banners to write your titles in, to write things you want to remember, or even to write something special that happened. This tutorial breaks down the many different ribbon banners’ styles, ensuring you will find a banner to suit any occasion.
Themes Tutorial
Some people like to have themes for their entire bullet journal or change the theme each day or week, depending on their mood. This video is an excellent watch if you are looking for some new themes to try out.
Bullet Journal Doodles Printables
There are a couple of different purposes behind the bullet journal printables. The first is the bullet journal template, and the second is practice sheets for doodles.
Bullet Journal Templates
These are printables that you can use to put together a bullet journal, so all you have to do is fill them out. Writing by hand is an integral part of bullet journaling, so you shouldn’t use the templates to create a digital journal. But you can use them to save you time drawing the templates, layouts, and doodles.
Doodle Practise Sheets
When you are first learning how to doodle, practice sheets are a great tool. You can use these sheets and draw the same doodle repeatedly until you are happy with what it looks like. Another option for these sheets is to trace the drawings on them right into your bullet journal to get the look you want.
