- Today, I'm finally spilling all the tea. (upbeat music) Hey everyone, It's Amanda. Welcome back to my channel. Today, I'm finally sharing all
of my bullet journal secrets that you guys have been wanting
to know for me for years. There's always been a
few things that you guys always always ask about whenever
I do a bullet journaling video on my channel, but they're never big enough to do like an individual video on, but I figured today I
would compile them all into one big Amanda's secret
guide to bullet journaling. These are just things that I've learned over the four years
now, bullet journaling. And I don't think any of
these tips are gonna be particularly life
changing or game-changing, it's not like I'm handing you
guys some secret concoction for the perfect bullet journal spread because the perfect bullet
journal spread doesn't exist. It's just all personal to you guys. But these are some tips that do help me when I'm creating spreads and hopefully you guys can apply them when you're bullet journaling and maybe it'll help you out in some way. Let's get started. Secret number one, tip number
one, secret number one, I always, always, always get
comments about my ability to draw straight lines without rulers. I posted a TikTok of me
drawing a straight line without a ruler, and it got
like eight million views. So clearly people are shook by
this secret ability of mine. And I promise it's
nothing too game-changing, but there are some tips that I do have when drawing straight
lines without a ruler, specifically for bullet
journaling, it's really, really helpful if you
have a dotted notebook. And that's why a lot of
people do use dotted notebooks when they're bullet journaling, because it's really
easy to measure things. It really helps when
you have the dots there as sort of a guide. This one in particular is of
course my Shop Amanda Rach Lee dotted journal, which I love so much. And you guys know that is
the current bullet journal that I'm using. So aside from using the dotted paper, which is obviously a big
help with straight lines, my big secret, guys,
are you ready for this? It's just to draw the
straight line towards you. I know that's nothing
huge and it doesn't sound like it would make that
much of a difference. I promise it does make a big difference. I'll explain, when I'm
drawing a straight line, basically I'm keeping my entire
wrist and arm kind of stiff. I'm not letting, I don't know how to
describe this, actually. It's not like I'm moving the
pen, if that makes sense. I'm actually just pulling
my whole arm towards me in like a dragging motion and that I've found gives the best results for a straight line. So I will give you guys an example. Now there's pressure. What if I draw a squiggly line? So I'm just pulling this towards me. You can go as fast or as slow as you want. Obviously you're not gonna have like a perfectly straight line. Like it's not gonna look
exactly like a ruler, but it should be like
relatively pretty straight and you can keep practicing this. Just keep pulling it towards
you, it really helps a lot. And using those dots as a guide and yeah, that's my secret guide,
and you can see here, of course they're not
perfectly straight lines and there still some slight wobble to it. But I actually find out specifically when I'm ball journaling, that adds a little bit
of charm to the spreads and makes it look a
little more hand-drawn, doodly and personalized than
just using straight up a ruler. Obviously, if you are looking
for that perfect look, then you gotta use a ruler,
there's no way about it. And that is literally the secret. And that's why you'll see
whenever I'm drawing calendars or straight lines, I'll
always rotate my book around, depending on where I want the line to go, because basically I'm rotating
the book so that I always drag my lines towards me. It does make a big difference,
and I'll show you guys why. I feel like I wouldn't be able
to make as straight of a line if I do it horizontally. Like obviously it's still possible, but it's just not as easy for me. So you'll always see me
like rotating my book just so that I can always
be dragging my lines towards my body. So that's my straight line secret. And now you guys can be a
part of the no ruler game too. Amanda's bullet journaling
secret number two is about the grid
spacing cheat sheet page. If you guys have seen any of
my bullet journal setup videos, the like 2021, the 2019 one, you guys will have seen the grid spacing cheat sheet guide page that I always do at the beginning, and I always get questions
about how I use it. I wanted to walk you guys
through how I use this to create my spreads because
people still get confused whenever they see me using this. Firstly, I didn't come up with this idea. I think I saw this like two
years back from this user on Instagram, I'll insert their name here. So as you can see, we have numbers all across
the width to show how many dot spaces there are. In this case, there's 26. So you see, I have one through
26 in each dot grid space all the way across. So that means that there's 26 spaces. I did the same thing
vertically all the way down, which means that I'll have 38. And that helps because you can see A, how many grid spaces
the whole page is wide. And you can also use it as a counter when you're splitting up the page. Next on the grid space page, you'll basically want to
divide out your sections depending on what you use frequently in your bullet journals spreads. So in my case, a lot of
my bullet journal spreads, I need to split up the page
in half or thirds or quarters. So I did that both
vertically and horizontally. So horizontally, as I mentioned,
we have 26 dot spaces. So half of that would be 13, which is why I have a line down right on the 13th space here, and you
can see I marked it down at 13. And that way I can see, Oh,
if I need to split my page into half, automatically
I know I need to count out 13 dots spaces. And then as you can see, I have all these other marks, which might look confusing at first, but basically I've marked
off what I typically need when I'm splitting up pages. So a lot of times I'll need
to split up pages into thirds. So you'll see the red
ones here are thirds. I personally like to
have a space in between because a lot of times
when I'm making boxes for my bullet journal,
I'll, you know, have spaces in between the boxes, if that makes sense. And if I just want a line, then I can just include
that blank space there. So based on my grid spacing cheat sheet, if I wanted to split
up my page into thirds, I would need eight grid
spaces wide with one space in between an eight again,
and then eight again. If I didn't want that
one space in between, basically it would just be
splitting it up into nine spaces. I hope that makes sense. The same thing goes
vertically, as you can see, this is the thirds. So I split that up into
12, one space in between, a 12 again, one space in between. There's a little bit of maths involved, but it that's why it really helps to have this grid spacing cheat sheet, 'cause I can always refer to it and see, Oh, you know, today I need to
split up my page into quarters and I'll see that, Oh, that
means that it's six spaces. I hope this makes sense. It's kind of hard for
me to explain verbally, but you essentially just
wanna do all of your math grid division work on this one
page that you can refer to it whenever you are splitting
up your actual spread. So I made this weekly spread
on my Twitch live stream and I knew that I needed
four days on this side and three days on this, because I knew that I needed four columns, I was able to look over here and see that, Oh, if I want four columns,
it needs to be six wide. And then that's why I
split mine up six wide. Let me know if that clears
things up for you guys. If there's still a lot of
people that are confused, maybe I will make a separate video on it, but I think I explained
that okay, fingers crossed. On to Amanda's bullet
journaling secret number three, which is how I come up with
my themes and my designs and just make things look very
cohesive and nice together. And I would say a lot of my
artwork is actually based on graphic design elements, which is why I'm so interested
in typography and texts. But there are a few things
that come up in pretty much every design principle list. So I have it in front of me
and I'm gonna go through them and kind of talk about how I apply that into my bullet journal. So the first principle is
repetition and this really applies when I'm setting up a theme
because with a Halloween theme, maybe some people think
you need to add, you know, pumpkins and candy and the bats and the slime
and all of it altogether. And there's no shame in that. But if you are looking to
create something that is more, you know, design balanced, then repetition is
really, really important. And choosing certain
elements that you repeat throughout your whole setup will make it look really cohesive. So in my case, as you can see, I chose to repeat a few things. So the slime element, which is this shape, and then just a few like stars and bats, and that is repeated
throughout the entire setup of my bullet journal. You can see, I always use those few elements and I don't try to
change things throughout. So the next design principle is alignment and this really actually applies to a lot of bullet journal setups because you are working with
a lot of boxes and texts and lists and modules
that need to be aligned. And this design principle
is one of those things that you don't notice good alignment until all the alignment is completely off. And it's really
off-putting when you notice like bad alignment. An example of bad alignment
would be if things are super scattered around the page. And again, if that's
what you're going for, that's totally fine. But these are just basic
principles that make things look typically more
aesthetically pleasing to the eye and easy to read and makes
your eye kind of like flow throughout the page. If you carefully arrange
the elements on a page that makes things really align nicely, like make the text align with the boxes, it's just like a chef's kiss moment, and it just looks way nicer. It kind of just makes
like a really logical flow to the page. So as a general rule, as I mentioned, things should be lined up together and it kind of makes nice white spaces. This is a good example of
good alignment on a page. As you can see, I've
lined up all my text here and it also lines up with this box. I've left aligned the text as well, so that it's not like, you
know, kind of zig-zaggy, it's all lined up here. I have my text here
that lines up perfectly in the center of this box, same here. It's all kind of centered. They're all on the same
plane and all lined up and it just fits really nicely. And I can, you know, we can
see that it's nice to look at and kind of neat and visually organized. The next design principle, I feel like I'm teaching
a design class is contrast and contrast applies to
not only like colors, but contrast in shapes, in
sizes, in lines and all of that. And I really use this a lot
in my bullet journal spreads, specifically with colors. So contrast and color, a
good example of that would be the October spread where I
have the dark, dark black, and then I have the really
bright, vibrant green. And I feel like that gives
off a nice contrast in color. The September page is
also another good example of contrasting color. Obviously it's not as apparent
as the October contrast, but contrast can also be like
subtle, if that makes sense, I have a darker purple
and a lighter purple, which means that they're different hues and same with this like lighter beige. I also have really like
block squared out fonts, but then I have circles and stuff. You just want to make sure
that certain things stand out and certain things fall back and you wanna play off
of each other like that. I think it's really good to
stick to two or three different kind of elements that contrast each other, just to make sure things are cohesive 'cause you don't wanna have like 10 different colors going on 'cause then nothing
will contrast anything. They'll all kind of cancel each other out, which is why I do typically keep to a few different design elements. Like I'll stick to two or three colors or two or three shapes
or two or three elements from that theme and make sure
that there is nice contrast, repetition and alignment
all throughout those. An example of contrast in size would be this like March spread here. I have the big leaf elements, which are really large, but then the other element
that I have on the page are these small circles. It wouldn't look as good if
I had so many large circles because then everything
would be equal in size and there's no contrast,
which kind of means that nothing stands out on the page, because I have a contrast
in these small circles, the leaves are able to jump out more, but still adds a nice element. Contrast can also refer to lettering, which I use a lot of contrast in lettering in my bullet journal spreads. So for example, like this October setup, there was so much going
on with the, you know, the drips and all curvy and stuff. So I decided to go for
something completely opposite of their really ornate design and just went for a simple all caps font, because I felt like if I went for a really overly complex font, it would just not contrast
enough with the actual design of the spread. Same goes for these quote
pages that I do a lot of. You can see there's
contrast in the lettering. I have like bold all caps font, and then I have more of
an elegant cursive font. I also have contrast in the color, like this is completely black and then these ones are kind
of white and hollowed out, just to create a balance in that. And then here I have
more of an elegant font, compared to a really typewritery written out structured font. So creating that contrast
and balance in your lettering and your designs can really
help things stand out more, in the case of these quote spreads, if I did the whole quote in
the same font size, color, and everything, nothing
would have stood out, but because I changed things
up in between, you know, there's easily things
that you can focus on. In this case, you know, you focus on the lettering of start because it does stand out more. And in here you focus on the progress. So you're able to really
make things go directly into people's eyeballs. I know this was a lot, this is basically like a
design visual arts course, but I think the main thing
I like to keep in mind is that I try to keep things
as concise as possible. And I know it might not seem like that because a lot of my spreads
have doodles and everything, but in my head, I really am pairing things
down to the basic elements and colors that I've set
for this specific theme. Like for this theme, I've really narrowed it down to the green and black elements. I have the slime and then
maybe a few bats and stars and I'll use those sparingly throughout, instead of trying to fit
all of them together. For example, with this weekly spread, it could've been really easy
for me to make the titles have like slime, and
maybe made the circles turn into bat shapes and
just have all the elements spewed out into one page, but I really wanted to make it concise, so that's why I opted for
simple box and a circle. We have the contrast in
shapes, contrast in colors, as you can see. In terms of alignment, you can
see they all align up here, the box tasks at the bottom
align, down here as well. And what else do we have, repetition, I have repetition of
shapes, repetition of color and repetition of the
washitape elements as well. By using those design principles, it just creates more unity on the page Instead of having things look too chaotic. Hello, I'd like to clarify a little, this doesn't mean that
just because artwork or design follows these
design principles exactly, it will automatically
look amazing or good. And in the same token, if a piece of art or design
doesn't follow these principles, that also doesn't mean that it looks bad. There's of course nuance
in all of these things. Some rules are made to be broken. Sometimes certain principles
will be more apparent than others, they're just
meant to be general guidelines. Let's say if your design isn't turning out as well as it could, maybe these things can be implemented or can be thought about
when you're creating any sort of artwork or design. If you like to make
artwork that doesn't follow any of those principles,
that's totally okay. These are just some things
that I like to keep in mind and have gotten to be
a little bit intuitive whenever I create anything now. All right guys, so my
last bullet journal secret is about fixing your mistakes. I always get questions about this. Like people always think
I don't make mistakes in my bullet journal
and if you tune into any of my Twitch streams, where I create bullet
journal spreads live, you would know that's not the case. I make so many mistakes
in my bullet journal. I just know how to fix them
and how to problem solve. This is something I
always say, but to me, art and anything creative is just
creative problem solving. When I'm drawing something, I am just constantly thinking
about how I can make it look better or how I can
fix something that I did. And to me, that's what
all creative things are, like for songwriting, your
problem solving chords that go together. I actually do have a whole
separate video on different ways to fix your bullet journaling mistakes. I think a lot of people don't know it because it's from like
three or four years ago, but I still use all of
those tips and tricks. So I'll be sure to link it above. The one that I do use the most and the one that people
ask me the most about is my white pens and my white markers, which I often use to
cover up any mistakes, kind of like whiteout, but my white pen and
white markers secrets, I'm gonna share with you
guys my favorites here, because I know it can
be really hard to find a really good white pen and marker. So for a white pen, when I wanna cover up mistakes
that maybe are smaller or more detailed, or even if I'm using this
to write on black paper, I'll always use the Gelly Roll 10. This is from Sakura America, specifically the 10 thickness, guys. I see a lot of comments
from people saying that their Sakura Gelly Rolls
aren't as opaque as mine. I think it might be because
some people are using the 08 thickness or the 05
thickness, which isn't as good. The 10 thickness is where it's at. It's juicy, it's very opaque
and it writes really well on black paper. You can also use it to write on top of different black markers. And sometimes that actually
affects the opaqueness of the Gelly roll, I think a lot of people
don't realize this, but this doesn't write
well over certain markers. So I don't think it writes very well over Crayola super tips, but it does write really well
over like actual archival ink, like the pigment microns or
the Tombow food knows gaze. So if your Sakura Gelly Roll 10 isn't writing well on
top of certain things, maybe change up what
you're using underneath it. The other three that I like, these are more paint marker style. So these are for when I'm
covering up larger mistakes. My newest favorite is the Archer and Olive
Acrylograph markers, which are really great. These come in two different thicknesses. This one is the 0.7 millimeter and the three millimeter is thicker. So, you know, I kind of use
those depending on whether I'm writing stuff or covering mistakes. And then these ones Uni
Posca paint pens are great. They also come in different thicknesses. And this guy is for when
I'm covering big mistakes. This is the Pilot juice paint marker. She's thick with two C's and I can easily cover a mistake like that. But if we're talking a big mistake, as in the whole page type of thing, this right here is a really
good secret and tool to have. These are the Archer and Olive notepads, and they're just perforated
pages that you can rip out and then glue into your bullet journal. So it's really easy instead
of going your pages together, you can kind of have
this extra handy dandy, you know, book of extra
pages that you can glue in. I have them in different colors, but the white one is really good, if you just wanna restart your page and that way you don't need to, you know, glue all your pages together
and end up running out of pages in your bullet journal. But for more decorative things, you can also have the black
one and the craft paper one, which I use a lot in my spreads as well. I'll leave a link to these down below. They're really great, they
fit well in A5 notebooks. So they actually do work well in the shop Amanda Rach Lee, journals as well. You guys already know, I love Archer and Olive,
they're great quality products. So that's how I cover my
bullet journal mistakes. I do highly recommend you
check out that other video from like years back, because there's even more tips in there. All right guys, so I spilled the tea. Those were four of my
bullet journaling secrets. As I mentioned, it's nothing new, nothing life changing or special, but I do keep all of those things in mind and use those tips and tricks when I'm creating my
bullet journal spreads. So hopefully they help you guys out too. Let me know if there's
anything else in particular that you guys are curious about my art design bullet journaling process. Maybe I can make a separate video on those or part two bullet journaling
secrets with Amanda. If you wanna see more of my spreads, you can follow me on Twitch
for some live streams. We make weekly spreads live. We recently restocked the shop,
Amanda Rach Lee washy tapes. And of course the Nope Dotty
notebooks are available on there as well. Hopefully this video helps you out and you feel more well-equipped
with some tips and tricks and Amanda Rach Lee approved secrets when you're creating your spreads. Hope you guys have an awesome day. Keep doodling, bye everyone.
