March Plan with Me 2019

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I usually have my themes planned well in advance, but for this March plan with me I was making last minutes changes a lot. The theme I settled on is a bit different. A bit darker… a bit controversial dare I say?

But I wanted to try out something completely outside the norm for me. For that, I went in a totally new direction.

This month’s theme:

Pirates.

I know. From the girl who usually does unicorns and cartoons. Pirates is a bit different. Especially since I decided to do grittier pirates. No caricature of Long John Silver here.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching Black Sails but this theme was calling to me.

As usual, you can see a bunch of the inspiration I used from the wonderful artists that I found and pinned to this Pinterest board.

March Plan with Me Theme

As I mentioned I had a lot of trouble deciding what I wanted to make my theme this month.

I even had more trouble after I picked pirates and almost abandoned the idea since I had no idea how I was going to draw all this stuff.

I didn’t want it to be bright and cute this month so trying to draw stuff that’s a bit ‘edgy’ is outside of my comfort zone. If you’ve been with me for a while you know that I don’t have a lot of confidence in my people drawing skills.

I was also concerned with how much time it would take to draw out each spread so that I was happy with it.

My bullet journal is primarily an organizational tool. I like to get creative with it but if I can’t use it since I can’t finish a layout, it’s not doing its job. That is a no-go for me.

My solution?

Print pictures I liked and cut them out to use in collages.

You don’t have to be an artist to bullet journal

Last year my May spread was primarily cut outs and it produced some of the spreads that I loved the most. If you don’t like to draw or “aren’t good at it” then try something else!

Use stickers, magazine clippings, stencils, wrapping paper, whatever you have on hand.

Or remember, decorations are optional to begin with.

• Related: February Plan with Me
• Related: December Flip Through

Finding inspiration

So after I decided what I was going to do it was time to troll the internet and Pinterest. I did a ton of searches to find images that I liked and that complemented each other. When I started looking I had no idea how many pictures I needed and I didn’t know how many I would need either.

So I just went ham.

I searched pirate sword, treasure, flag, chest, siren, ship, kraken and any other pirate terms I could think of to get the biggest amount of variety.

There were a lot of overtly sexualized female pirates that I needed to steer away from. I did include a few pictures of women but I didn’t want them to be smutty. Be warned, if you do some searching for pictures like I did, you will come across a few.

Don’t let that deter you though.

I really liked how much of this turned out and I hope you do too so keep reading!

Either way, if you like the spreads tell me in the comments, if you don’t I’d love to know what you would do differently so leave me a comment.

The Spreads of this March Plan with Me

On to the layouts!

Calendar

Something that I’ve been failing to do since I started this journal is colour code my calendar like I had been doing last year.

I resolve to change that this month. March is busy in our family with March break (a week off of school for the kids), work schedules and no less than 9 birthdays, 5 of which being in a span of 3 days…

Safe to say that things can get hectic fast.

Colour coding my mini calendar will give me an overview of how things are falling and what’s overlapping. Super useful.

I decided to ditch 3 of the habits I’ve been tracking since I have successfully automated one and am in a very steady rhythm for the other 2.

This means I should probably start working on something new… maybe my wake up time since that’s been a little all over recently. I have a bit of space at the end of my tracker to add it in when I settle on a habit to work on.

I went with a curly cursive font on this spread but sort of wish I hadn’t. On the next spreads I used something else that I ended up liking better although it was more work.

Since I wasn’t drawing, it was still ok time wise.

I glued down my pictures then added some washi tape cut into small pieces to give it a bit more of a rough effect.

Gratitude and Chores

For my gratitude tracker I went with a bit of a different header. I used an Old English font (which I could have spaced a bit better) and wrote out “what I treasure”. I thought that was a good pirate-y equivalent.

On my chores page I couldn’t resist writing “swab the decks”.

I added in a few pictures to each of these spreads, a compass and a mermaid with a sailor on the right side and a parrot, anchor and a classic pirate skull on the right.

I wanted to keep everything pretty monochromatic with only the cold blue of the tape as an accent but after I did this spread I wanted to add a bit more.

In order to jazz it up a bit, I went back in with a few fine liners and my silver and gold gel pens and added in some detail. Some gold on the compass, outlined the rose, added a tiny bit of green to the parrot.

Just adds a little something.

Planning Pages

Every month including is March plan with me need planning pages. For these planning pages I stuck with the same Old English font which I think I did a pretty good job with, if I do say so myself.

I ended up doing roughly the same arrangement for my collages here as well. Not on purpose, it just ended up being that way.

On my blogging page I have a skeleton over a chest and some coins and keys along the bottom of the page.

On my March Plan page I out a bunch of people in peril.

A kraken attacking a ship, a mermaid glamouring a pirate and a ship in a rough sea. It sounds so 🥺 when you say it but I think it looks great.

I didn’t put in much colour since I didn’t want to crowd the more intricate pictures on this page but I do like that I made the bubbles under the water of the second picture silver.

It makes them shine nicely and adds a little magic.

Weekly Spread

The first week of March is just like the first week of February.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do at first but then I settled on doing a larger picture page and then doing slightly larger boxes than usual for the 3 days and a box for next week’s priorities.

I had some trouble at first because most pirate quotes aren’t really happy go lucky and if they are they’re silly. So I didn’t really want to have many quotes this month.

I compromised a bit here with “take what you want”.

To me it was a to serve as a reminder that I can get the things I want in my life if I just reach out and take it.

I did not want to add the “and give nothing back” part of that quote since I love to give back so that’s contradictory to me.

Below is a close up of some of the dotted details a added to a few of the pictures.

Your Turn

I’m excited to do something nontraditional for this March plan with me in terms of my theme. It’s a bit darker, a bit grittier but I needed to do something different after the princesses of February.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved drawing the princesses and I think they represent some wonderful stories but I’ll be doing Sailor Moon and other girly themes later this year so I wanted to round it out with something that was well… the opposite.

What do you think? Would you ever do a theme like this?

Tell me about it below!