Awhile back I purchased a  planner* from gouletpens.com and I didn’t do anything with it. I snagged it for about $4 off their clearance rack because it was for the 2010 and 2011 school year. The pages while tough enough for a lot of use for I was planning I felt needed a little heavy duty treatment,  so I started gluing pages together, every other page. This gave me a very heavy weight page.

I then applied a coat of gesso and watercolor crayon to each left hand page. I used a soft brush to really blend the colors into the gesso. Each page has a soft tint of the watercolor crayon. I then used tape that I’d masked off painting (it's got random colors all over it) with to cover up dates and calendars on the right hand page, leaving me with a nice framed grid on the right hand page.

I cut no pages from the planner. I know it’s strange but I really like that stressed out thick spine look. I also plan on adding a lot of collage to the left page. The right page may get some collage but I plan on mainly writing on it.

The other thing about this journal? I’m drawing in it with sharpies and nothing else. It’s the reason I wanted to glue pages and gesso them, so that I wouldn’t get soak through.

So far the journal is a combination of collage, sketch and writing. I always work in spreads so this journal is really working well for that.

Here’s what a spread in the book looks like with no sketching, collage or writing.

And here are a few finished pages:

*It's a 2010-2011 Rhodia 6×9 planner with a Rhodia orange soft flexible cover. I'll show some pics of the cover. I distessed it with my own blend of grunge glaze.