Halloween suits junk journalling better than any other season. The colour palette is already aged - browns, ochres, faded blacks - and the subject matter was made for antique printing. Here is how to put a Halloween journal together without it turning into orange plastic.
Skip the orange
Modern Halloween is orange and purple. Vintage Halloween is not. Old Halloween postcards and party ephemera from the 1900s to the 1930s used muted golds, deep browns, faded blacks, sage and a dull brick red.
If you want the antique look, build the whole journal on that palette and use bright orange only as a small accent, if at all. Three colours plus aged cream.
Subjects that hold up
Not everything spooky works on paper. What does:
- Moths and beetles - engraved specimen style, more unsettling than a cartoon bat
- Black cats - a staple of vintage Halloween postcards
- Moons and stars - simple shapes that fill gaps without competing
- Apothecary and poison labels - printed wording does a lot of work here
- Pumpkins - flat and engraved rather than glossy and 3D
What tends not to work: anything with a cartoon face, anything neon, anything with a drop shadow.
Build a spread around one hero
Halloween pages go loud fast. Pick one large piece per spread - a big moth, a full apothecary label, a single moon - and keep everything else small and quiet around it. A page with six competing spooky elements reads as a party invitation, not a journal.
Age it harder than usual
Halloween ephemera benefits from heavier distressing than botanical or Christmas material. Darken the cut edges with brown ink, tear rather than cut where you can, and let the backgrounds be genuinely grubby. A too-clean Halloween page looks like a school craft project.
Start in September
The point of a seasonal journal is that it is finished before the season ends. Print and cut in September, assemble the pages in early October, fill them through the month. Starting on the 30th of October means you are still cutting on the 1st of November.
Ready-made Halloween material
If you want the printing done: Halloween Clipart cut-apart sheets for cards and stickers, and the free vintage paper set for aged backgrounds - the ledger and dictionary papers in it suit Halloween as well as anything.
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