You want to start a junk journal. You’ve been staring at them on Pinterest for six months. You’ve watched the tutorials. You have a vague mental list of supplies you think you need. And yet – the blank journal is still blank, the supplies are still unpurchased, and somehow another week has gone by.
I know this feeling because I lived it for almost a year before I actually made my first one. And here’s what finally got me unstuck: I realized the thing stopping me wasn’t skill or money or time. It was this pressure I’d invented in my head that my first journal had to be as good as the beautiful ones I kept seeing.
It doesn’t. Your first journal is supposed to be messy and experimental and a little awkward. That’s not a bug in the process – that IS the process. This guide on how to start a junk journal is specifically for people who are ready to stop watching and start making. No experience required. No expensive supplies required. No artistic talent required.
Let’s actually do this.
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What You Actually Need to Start (It’s Less Than You Think)
The biggest lie in junk journaling is that you need a lot of stuff. You’ve probably seen those YouTube hauls with 40 products spread across a table. Ignore all of that. Those videos are aspirational. Your first journal is practical.
For junk journal for beginners, here’s the real starting list:
A blank book or bound notebook. This is your journal base. A composition notebook blank journal – the old-school black and white kind you can find at any drugstore for under two dollars – is genuinely one of the best starting points. You could also use a spiral notebook, an old hardcover book with pages you’re willing to paint over, or just a stack of folded papers that you bind yourself. All of these work. There is no wrong answer here.
Glue stick and/or tape. That’s it for adhesives to start. A basic school glue stick handles most papers without wrinkling. Washi tape variety pack craft – a simple set with a few patterns – pulls double duty as both adhesive and decoration, which is why it’s in every junk journaler’s kit eventually. You can pick up a starter set for about $8-12 and it lasts forever.
Old magazines, junk mail, or any printed paper you were going to recycle. This is your ephemera base. Those catalogs you normally throw straight into recycling? Pull them out first. Old receipts, food packaging, wrapping paper scraps, tea bags, paper napkins. You have more than you realize.
Scissors. Any pair.
Something to color with. This can be as simple as colored pencils. Or acrylic paint set beginners – a basic set of six to eight colors runs around $12-15 and opens up a lot of page-making options. Or just a ballpoint pen. Anything that makes marks.
That’s five things. Some of them you already own right now. The rest cost maybe $20 total if you have to buy everything from scratch.
For a deeper look at what to add as you get more into it, our junk journal supplies guide covers everything from basic to advanced, with honest takes on what’s worth buying versus what you can skip.
Your First Spread – What to Actually Do on Day One
OK here’s the part nobody tells you clearly enough: your goal on day one is not to make something beautiful. Your goal is to make something exist. There is a huge difference.
The first thing you do: Open your blank journal to the first two pages. Look at them. Now close the tab with all the tutorials. You’re going to figure this out by doing, not by watching.
Step one – kill the white. Blank white pages are psychologically intimidating. Cover them with something, anything, right now. Tear pages out of an old magazine. Rip up a piece of junk mail. Glue those things down in a loose collage. It doesn’t need to look good. It just needs to not be blank anymore. Once you’ve got paper stuck down on both pages, something changes – the pressure drops and it starts to feel like play instead of performance.
Step two – add a layer. Take your washi tape or some colored paper and add something over the collage layer. Strips of tape across the page. A torn piece of tissue paper overlapping the magazine bits. A piece of cardboard egg carton pressed into wet paint if you want texture. The point here is to get used to the idea that layers create depth, and that you can cover up anything you don’t like by just adding more stuff on top.
Step three – put something personal on the page. Write a date. Stick in a receipt from something you did this week. Clip out a word from a magazine that resonates. Add one thing that means something to you, not just something that looks pretty. This is what separates a junk journal from just a collage project – it holds your real life inside it.
Step four – stop before you think you should. Seriously. It’s tempting to keep going until the page feels “done,” but most beginners over-work their early pages by adding too much. Leave some breathing room. Put the journal down. Look at it tomorrow with fresh eyes.
That’s your first spread. And honestly? It’s probably going to look better than you expected.
For a complete walkthrough of construction – how to build signatures, bind pages, create covers – our how to make a junk journal guide goes deep on all of it.
The Supplies That Actually Make a Difference
Once you’ve done that first spread and you’re already thinking about what to try next (it happens fast), there are a few supplies that genuinely level up what you can do without costing a lot.
Gesso. If you only buy one art supply for your junk journal, make it this. Gesso white acrylic primer is a white, slightly textured medium you brush over pages before adding paint or ink. It primes surfaces, creates a paintable layer over text you want to cover, and gives your pages this beautiful matte base to work on. A small jar costs about $8-10 and lasts ages. It transformed the way my pages look.
Foam squares. Small foam squares adhesive scrapbooking lifts elements slightly off the page surface, giving them a little shadow and dimension. It’s a tiny thing that makes a visual difference. You peel off the backing and stick them under photos, tags, labels, or any flat embellishment you want to pop. A pack of 200 runs about $4-6.
A composition notebook as a base. Worth mentioning again specifically – if you want to start junk journaling without building a journal from scratch first, the classic composition notebook is the fastest path. The covers are sturdy enough to decorate, the pages take paint and collage well, and you can just… open it and start. No binding, no construction, no decisions. Just junk journaling.
The slower but deeply satisfying path is building your own journals from scratch – folding paper signatures, punching holes, hand-sewing the binding. That’s covered in detail over at how to make a junk journal when you’re ready for it.
Common Beginner Mistakes (That Don’t Actually Matter)
Here’s what I wish someone had told me before I started:
Worrying about whether it looks “good.” It doesn’t need to look good. It needs to exist. The journals that look amazing on Instagram have hundreds of hours of practice behind them. Your first journal is a practice journal, not a portfolio piece. The whole point is to experiment without stakes.
Buying supplies before making the first journal. This is the procrastination move dressed up as preparation. You don’t need to shop before you start. You need to start. I’ve seen people with $300 worth of supplies who have never made a single page because they’re waiting until they have “everything they need.” You have enough. Start.
Thinking you need special paper. I have used printer paper, brown paper bags, cereal box cardboard, pages from Reader’s Digest, tissue paper, a coffee filter, and the inside of a paper envelope in my journals. All of it works. None of it needed to be purchased new.
Comparing your journal to someone who’s been doing this for years. This one is important enough to repeat twice. The beautiful journals you’re admiring? Those came after 50 or 100 journals that looked like yours. Nobody is born making gorgeous spreads. Everyone starts exactly where you are right now.
Abandoning a journal when it hits a rough patch. Every journal has pages you love and pages you cringe at. That’s normal. Don’t toss the whole journal because you made a page you don’t like. Gesso over it. Stick something on top of it. Or just turn the page and start fresh on the next one. A journal full of “failed” pages that you finished is worth more than a perfect journal that never got made.
How to Keep Going After the First Page
The thing that kills most first junk journals is momentum loss after the first few pages. You love the beginning, you hit a wall in the middle, and it quietly gets pushed to the back of a drawer. Here’s how to avoid that.
Give yourself permission to leave gaps. You don’t have to fill your journal front to back in order. Jump around. Start a new page wherever you feel like it. Skip pages. Come back to the hard ones when you’re more inspired. A journal isn’t a homework assignment.
Keep a “to-glue” pile somewhere visible. Collect things as you go through your week – a napkin with an interesting logo, a piece of ribbon, a receipt with a funny total, a seed packet from the garden. Keep them in a small box or envelope near your craft space. When you sit down to journal and you don’t know what to do, you have a ready pile to pull from. Half the battle is just having materials nearby and accessible.
Look at other people’s work for ideas, not comparison. There’s a difference between scrolling Pinterest to get inspired versus scrolling to compare yourself. Use our junk journal ideas page for the former – it’s organized by theme and technique so you can find ideas that actually fit what you want to make, without falling into the comparison trap.
Set a tiny timer. This sounds silly but it works. Tell yourself you’re going to work in your journal for exactly ten minutes. Not an hour. Not until it’s done. Ten minutes. Most of the time you’ll go way over. But the small commitment removes the resistance that comes with sitting down to “do something creative,” which somehow feels like a huge undertaking when it’s just supposed to be fun.
Think of each journal as a practice round for the next one. The goal of your first journal is to fill it. That’s it. Fill it with anything – beautiful pages, embarrassing pages, experimental pages, lazy pages. Just fill it. When you flip through a completed journal, the bad pages stop bothering you. What you see instead is evidence that you made something, start to finish. That feeling is what makes you want to start junk journaling again.
You’re Already Ready
Genuinely – if you’ve read this far, you know enough to start. You know what supplies you need (not many). You know what to do on day one (kill the white, add layers, put something personal in). You know the mistakes to avoid (mostly the ones that are just excuses not to start).
The only thing left is to actually pick up a piece of paper and glue something down.
Go find a magazine you were going to recycle. Tear out three pages. Glue them into your blank book. That’s it. That’s how you start a junk journal.
Everything gets figured out from there.
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