Digital junk journaling on Windows

What a junk journal is

A junk journal is built from things other people throw away: book pages, envelopes, receipts, tea bag wrappers, tickets, tags, scraps of patterned paper, all layered into pages and written on. Doing it digitally keeps the look and loses the glue: you can reuse a favorite scrap on fifty pages, undo a cut, and never run out of the paper you love.

Your papers become backgrounds

Scan or photograph the papers you love, a page of an old dictionary, a sheet of music, a faded ledger, kraft paper, and import them as page backgrounds. Each one joins your template library, so every journal can use it, and you can put a different paper on every page. See page backgrounds.

Your ephemera becomes stickers

Photograph or scan the small pieces: a ticket stub, a luggage tag, a stamp, a label, a pressed flower. Bring them into the sticker drawer with its add tile and they are yours to place on any page.

• Sheets of ephemera on a white background can be peeled apart automatically. See sticker peeling.
• Anything else, cut out with the Knife: draw a loop around the piece and it comes away as its own sticker, exactly on your line. See cutting photos.
• File them in Sticker Book chapters, Papers, Tickets, Tags, Labels, Stamps, and tag them by color so you can find a blue scrap in a hurry.

Torn edges, your way

The Knife cuts exactly where you draw, and it does not add a torn paper effect for you. For a torn look, draw the loop the way paper tears: wobbly, uneven, with a little bite taken out here and there. The cut follows your hand.

Layer it like paper

A junk journal page is all about layers: the paper, the scraps glued on, the tucked in tag, the writing on top.

• Use layers for the big levels, and lock the background paper.
• Use Arrange to tuck a ticket under a scrap or bring a tag to the front. Tap the same spot twice to reach whatever is underneath.
• Turn a piece's opacity down so it reads as faded and sits back into the page.
• Double-tap any piece to crop it without losing the rest.

Make your own ephemera

Hand letter a label, draw a stamp, doodle a border. Loop around it and it becomes a sticker you can reuse. Your own ephemera collection grows every time you journal. See make a sticker.

Write over everything

Junk journals are written in: notes in the margins, words across a ticket, a date stamped over a scrap. The pencil catches the grain of the paper, the fountain pen swells and thins like a nib, and the highlighter stays translucent over a printed page. Pull a color from a scrap with the eyedropper so your ink belongs with it.

Print it

A digital junk journal can come back into the physical world. Order it as a softcover or hardcover book in premium color, one copy, and it arrives as a real journal with your collage pages bound inside. See printed books.

Questions