April Plan With Me 2019 – The Inspiration: Citrusy Water Infusion Recipe Art

After a couple of months taking a break to refocus, I’m excited to show you my planner setup for April. The inspiration this month’s plan with me: Recipe Art I’m completely obsessed with the idea of taking old family recipes and doodling the various elements and creating a visual recipe card.

This month I took that idea with a modern twist – each of the spreads for April are different fruit & herb water infusion recipes. I’m happy to say that it resulted in bright colors and mouth-watering blends. While researching the combinations, not only did I choose beautiful colors, but I look forward to trying these flavor combinations.

When I showed my husband, he looked excited and asked me when I was going to sample the recipes.  It’s an excellent opportunity to get back on track with my weight loss goals. Diet Dr pepper is my vice. I’m looking for a way to break its grip and cut the soda. Flavor-infused water sounded tempting and delicious all in one!

Watch the April Plan With Me video below and make sure to subscribe in the lower corner of the video!

Fun characteristics from this month’s plans:

In addition to bright, citrusy colors, and recipe inspirations, I’m excited about several different items featured throughout the month. After looking at some pictures of herbs (my friend Amy (@PurplescapeDesign) also did a challenge a couple of months ago featuring herbs), I tried to include their distinct characteristics and colors as I painted them. In the video, I mention the mint leaves, and if you look carefully at the mint leaves, it’s almost like they have a leaf within a leaf.

If you notice the way I painted the thyme leaf, I used the tip of the water pen and pushed down, leaving a leaf imprint. I discovered that trick a few months ago with some Tombow Dual Brush pens. I plan on showing you the specifics of this technique in a later post.

Circle Habit Tracker on Tracing Paper

The circular habit prints.  Using tracing paper, I printed a circle habit tracker and taped it over top of a large cut section of a painted orange. Since the paper is partly transparent, you can see the detail of the orange through the tracing paper. I did this in February too, and it’s going to happen more and more because I LOVE the look.

Note: If you try this at home – PLEASE be very careful with printing on tracing paper and DO NOT print using a laser printer – it will probably melt the paper and ruin your machine. I still have some kinks to work out to make it perfect, but I’m pretty excited.

Monthly Overview + Habit Tracker

I combined my monthly page with the habit tracker because I rarely referred to the monthly page by its self. I like the overview of the month, but I live mostly in my weekly plans. So I created a small monthly calendar with room to write out dates or monthly to-dos or notes below the calendar.

By the way, if you’ve never used a habit tracker before, I was skeptical, too. But once I started, I never stopped. It’s like it unlocks a secret magical will to improve your life one day at a time. And if you neglect it one day, week, month, you have the power to try again the next month.

For the longest time, I tracked ‘doing dishes’ because this household chore was a struggle every single day. Eventually, after several months, I created a steady habit and haven’t tracked it since, and I still do the dishes. I don’t like them, but I do the necessary evil thing.

Painting With Crayola Markers

If you’ve seen my other plan with me videos, you’ll already know that I LOVE painting in my journal both with watercolor and with Crayola Markers. It’s one of the reasons I tried out every notebook I could get my hands on and why I finally fell in love with my current notebook, one by Archer & Olive. If they had an affiliate program, I’d join in a heartbeat. The paper is 160 gsm (which means it’s very thick) and is so beautifully white instead of ivory or cream. Their paper can handle watercolor paint – most notebooks soak the paper and then bleed through to the other side.

There are two main reasons why I prefer painting in my journal with Crayola Markers:

One – They have so many colors! Two – there’s no paint texture left after painting with markers, so I can write over it with any marker or pen that I want.

A bonus reason why I love painting with Crayola Markers: I use less water on the page, so there’s less overall wrinkling and buckling.

Want to learn to paint with Crayola Markers too? Click to read my blog post – it’s really easy and you don’t need a lot of supplies to start adding pops of color to your planner.

Minimal Weeklies

As you can see, I didn’t include a lot of boxes or separated areas on my weekly layouts. I am trying some new layouts, but they’re all pretty minimal. One thing I added to most of the weeks was a line dedicated to each member of my family. My kids have ‘specials’ at school. They rotate classrooms or activities and need to bring or wear different items each day. In an attempt to be a well-put-together mother, I jot down each of their specials so I’m better prepared for wardrobe or equipment requests each day.

Large Space for Journaling/To-Dos

One reason why I’ve stuck with bullet journaling as my planner for so long (it’s now about 3 years since I started using a bullet journal to keep track of my life!), is the flexibility and creativity it offers. Last month I added quite a lot of journaling to each page and loved it.

Creating pages with minimal outlines allow me more flexibility for the needs of the week. So if I have a lot of miscellaneous to-dos, I have space to fill the week with these items. If, instead, I have a lot to record (more than just fits on my “All the Things” journal page”) the space on the weekly easily accommodates. If I need to add more space for journaling, as I did last month, I literally tape in a page or a section of paper so it lifts like a flap. Washi tape for the win!

I love sharing my plan with me videos & monthly planner set up. I hope I’ve given you some ideas and inspiration for adding function and fun to your planner.

Let me know what you think of my April Plan With Me in the comments below. I’d love to know which flavor infusion do you want to try.

Check back later this month for how to create flavor infusion doodles!