The fastest way to hit a wall with junk journaling is to scroll Pinterest with no plan and save 200 pins that all look amazing but pull in twenty different directions. What actually moves your work forward is picking one style, sitting with it long enough to absorb the visual language, and then trying it in your own journal. The rest is variation.
This is a guided tour of ten distinct junk journal styles – what defines each one, the colors and materials that signal it, and the easiest way to start a spread in that direction today. Bookmark the section that pulls you in. Make one page in that style this week. That’s how taste actually develops.
How to Use This Gallery
Each style below has the same three parts: what defines it, the color and material palette that signals the look, and where to start if you want to try a spread in that direction. Read the descriptions like you’re choosing a vibe, not a recipe. Two artists can both make “botanical” pages that look nothing alike because they’re starting from the same vocabulary and ending in different places.
If you’re brand new to junk journaling and don’t know where to start, the Vintage Antique style is the most forgiving – the aesthetic itself rewards imperfection and uses materials you can find for free or cheap. If you have a maximalist instinct, Bohemian Eclectic and Mixed-Media Art will give you the most freedom. If you want clean and quiet, jump to Modern Minimalist or Color-Story.
1. Vintage Antique
The original junk journal aesthetic and still the most photographed style on Instagram. Everything looks 80 years old: yellowed paper, foxed edges, sepia photos, old handwriting in fading ink, postage stamps, ledger paper, library cards, sheet music. Brown is the dominant color. Texture matters more than precision. A page with one corner curling slightly looks more right than a page glued flat.
Palette: Cream, ivory, tea-stain brown, sepia, walnut, faded black. Materials: Old book pages, dictionary scraps, vintage postcards, sheet music pieces, brass brads, lace scraps, walnut ink for distressing.
Where to start: Tear a page out of an old book (thrift store hardcovers are perfect – look for pre-1970 paper), glue it whole as your background, then layer one piece of ephemera, one photo, and one piece of journaling on top. Edge everything with vintage photo distress ink. That’s a complete vintage spread.
2. Botanical Nature
Pressed flowers, leaf prints, watercolor washes in greens and blues, illustrated plant specimens, scientific labels. The Botanical style borrows from old herbarium pages and 19th-century field journals. Pages feel quiet, observational, almost meditative. Plenty of white space, hand-lettered Latin names, the occasional bee or moth illustration. This is the style people go to when they’re tired of busy maximalism.
Palette: Sage green, moss, ochre, cream, soft brown, dusty blue. Materials: pressed flowers, cold-press watercolor paper, botanical stickers or stamps, twine, kraft tags, a fine-tip waterproof pen for hand lettering.
Where to start: Press a small flower or leaf for a week between book pages. Glue it down with matte gel medium on a cream-colored background. Hand-letter the common and scientific name beneath it. Add a watercolor wash behind the specimen using one diluted green tone. Date it in the corner. Done.
3. Travel Memory
The “I want to remember this trip” style. Boarding passes, train tickets, hotel receipts, currency, brochures, hand-drawn maps, polaroids, café napkins. Travel junk journals lean personal and a little messy – you’re documenting reality, not designing a magazine spread. Foreign-language text adds instant atmosphere. So do dated stamps and city names handwritten across pages.
Palette: Whatever the trip’s palette is. Coastal trips lean blue and sand; mountain trips lean green and grey; city trips often pull warm yellows and grey concrete tones. Materials: Actual travel ephemera you collected, instant film prints, a travelers notebook, washi tape for borders, a fine-tip black pen.
Where to start: Don’t save travel scraps for “someday.” Glue them down the day you get home while the trip is still loud in your head. One spread per day or per location. Hand-write what you ate and one thing you noticed. The text matters more than the design – you’re writing for future you.
4. Romantic Floral
Soft pinks, ivory, blush, gold accents, lace, ribbon, roses, hearts, antique-style scripts. The Romantic style is what people make for wedding albums, love-letter journals, and Mother’s Day gifts. Layers are dense but the palette is gentle, so the pages read as delicate rather than busy. Vintage Romantic overlaps – cabbage roses, French script, dried rose petals, sepia-tinted lace.
Palette: Blush, dusty pink, ivory, gold leaf, cream, soft mauve. Materials: Floral patterned paper, lace trim, gold foil, satin ribbon, pressed rose petals, gold embellishments, a calligraphy or italic pen.
Where to start: Cover your spread with a soft floral patterned paper. Layer a strip of lace horizontally across the lower third. Mat a focal element (photo, quote, or pressed flower) on cream cardstock and place it on the rule-of-thirds. Add one gold accent – a small embellishment or a torn strip of gold foil. Less is more in this style.
5. Coastal Beach
Blues, sandy beiges, weathered wood textures, shells, sea glass colors, faded nautical prints, anchor and compass motifs, latitude/longitude coordinates. Coastal junk journals feel like a beach house guest book in journal form. Texture comes from rough-edged kraft, frayed linen, twine, and pages that look slightly water-damaged on purpose.
Palette: Faded denim, seafoam, cream, sand, driftwood grey, soft sun-bleached coral. Materials: Kraft paper, nautical stamps, twine, linen thread, sea glass beads, vintage-look nautical charts, watercolor washes in pale blue.
Where to start: Background of a kraft or off-white paper, watercolor wash in pale blue across the lower half (the “horizon” effect). Add a small piece of vintage-looking nautical text – latitude coordinates or a fragment of a sea chart. Finish with twine tied around the gutter and a single dried beach element if you have one.
6. Bohemian Eclectic
The maximalist’s playground. Mixed metals, layered patterns, embroidered details, fabric scraps, beads, charms, hand-painted mandalas, mismatched typography, tassels, tiny mirrors. Bohemian junk journaling rewards collecting from everywhere and not worrying about matching. The look comes from confident layering of patterns that “shouldn’t” go together but do because they share an underlying warmth.
Palette: Warm earth tones with jewel accents – rust, ochre, deep teal, plum, mustard, brass. Materials: Fabric scraps, embroidery floss, patterned washi tape, brass brads, mixed beads, mehndi-style stencils, hand-painted or stamped patterns.
Where to start: Pick a fabric scrap as your “anchor” – one piece that sets the color palette. Build the spread around its warm and cool tones. Layer at least three patterned papers that pull from those colors. Add hand-stitching, even just a few long uneven stitches in a contrasting thread. Embellish with one or two beads or charms.
7. Modern Minimalist
The “less but more intentional” approach. Lots of white space, one or two paper elements per spread, geometric shapes, clean sans-serif typography, restrained color palette (often just black + cream + one accent). Minimalist junk journals look more like art books than scrapbooks. Every element earns its place. The discipline is in editing, not gathering.
Palette: Cream, black, kraft, plus one accent color. Materials: Plain text-weight paper, geometric stamps, solid-color washi tape, simple kraft tags, a clean sans-serif typewriter or alphabet set, one or two embellishments per spread maximum.
Where to start: Cream background. One photo or one piece of text centered on the rule-of-thirds. One strip of washi tape running parallel to the photo edge. One small typed date. Stop there. The empty space is doing real work – resist filling it.
8. Literary
For book lovers. Pages built around quotes, character studies, book reviews, reading lists, library cards, vintage book illustrations. The literary junk journal uses typography as decoration – book page backgrounds, dictionary cutouts arranged into found poetry, hand-lettered favorite lines. Often monochromatic (browns and creams) because the text is doing all the visual work.
Palette: Cream, kraft, sepia, black ink, occasional pop of one color per spread. Materials: Old book pages (thrift store hardcovers), alphabet stamps, library card pockets, dictionary pages, vintage book illustrations, a black ink pen.
Where to start: Tear a page from a book you love. Glue it as your background. Circle or underline a phrase that pulls you in. Write your own response or memory it triggered beneath it. Add a library card pocket to one corner with a tag tucked inside listing what you read this month.
9. Mixed-Media Art
The painterly approach. Acrylic and watercolor backgrounds, modeling paste textures, gesso, stencils, stamps, gel printing, hand-painted images. Mixed-media junk journaling treats the page as a canvas first and a junk journal second – layers of paint and texture come before any paper or ephemera lands. The finished spreads feel like small abstract paintings with text incorporated.
Palette: Whatever you mix on the page. Often layered with rich jewel tones over an earth-toned base. Materials: acrylic paint set, white gesso, modeling paste, stencils, brayer or roller, gel medium, mark-making tools (anything with texture – bubble wrap, corks, old keys).
Where to start: Gesso your page (this seals it and gives paint something to grab). Layer two or three thinned acrylic colors with a brayer, letting each dry. Add stencil texture in a contrasting color. Once the painted base is fully dry, add your collage and journaling elements on top. The painted layer becomes the background instead of paper.
10. Color Story
Spreads built around a single color palette rather than a theme. Monochromatic (one color in many shades), analogous (three colors next to each other on the color wheel), or complementary (two colors directly opposite). The Color Story approach is the most transferable skill on this list – once you can pull a spread together by color, you can fake any of the other nine styles by changing the source materials.
Palette: Whatever you pick. The discipline is staying within it. Materials: Sort your paper stash by color before you start. Pull only the pieces that fit your chosen palette. A small color wheel on your desk helps when you’re unsure if two colors talk to each other. Embellishments in the same color family.
Where to start: Pick one color you love. Pull every scrap of patterned paper, every washi tape, every embellishment in that color and three neighboring shades. Build a spread using only those pieces. The cohesion will feel almost effortless because you’ve eliminated the most common visual-noise problem before you started.
Where to Find Ongoing Inspiration
Once you know which styles pull you in, narrow your sources so you’re not drowning in Pinterest. A few places that consistently produce work worth studying:
- Instagram hashtags – #junkjournal, #junkjournaling, #junkjournalinspiration, and the style-specific tags like #vintagejunkjournal or #botanicaljournal will surface working artists daily.
- YouTube flip-throughs – watching someone page through a completed journal teaches more about pacing and variation than any single photo. Search “junk journal flip through” plus your style.
- Vintage thrift store books – old field guides, recipe books, atlases, and hymnals are free or near-free inspiration plus immediate raw material.
- Museum archives online – the Smithsonian Open Access, the British Museum image library, and the New York Public Library Digital Collections all have free downloadable historical illustrations and ephemera.
- Your own life – the receipts in your bag, the ticket stub on your fridge, the dried flower someone gave you. The best junk journal source is the one closest to you that you keep walking past.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is junk journal inspiration?
Junk journal inspiration is the visual language of a particular junk-journaling style – the colors, materials, layouts, and motifs that define a recognizable look like vintage antique, botanical, or bohemian. Picking one style and absorbing its vocabulary lets you make spreads that feel intentional rather than randomly assembled.
How do I find my own junk journal style?
Try several. Make one spread in each of three styles that interest you and notice which felt most natural to work in – not which one looks best when finished. The style that fits your hand is the one where you didn’t have to keep checking references. Most artists end up blending two or three styles rather than fitting cleanly into one.
Where do junk journal artists get their materials?
A mix of sources. Old books from thrift stores or library sales, found ephemera from your own daily life, paper packs from craft stores, online specialty shops for things like vintage stamps or unusual papers, and curated ephemera packs from Amazon or Etsy when you want a quick supply boost. Most builders use all of these depending on what a particular spread needs.
Is it OK to copy a junk journal style I saw online?
Yes – that’s how every artist learns. Copy openly and obviously while you’re absorbing the visual language, then start substituting your own materials and choices once it feels natural. The goal is to internalize a style well enough that you stop needing to look at the reference. Direct copies are for practice; published or shared work should be your own variation.
How do I keep my junk journal inspiration organized?
One Pinterest board per style you’re actively exploring, not a single mega-board. Limit yourself to 30-50 pins per board, and prune as you save new ones. Or go analog – keep a small visual journal where you sketch or paste tiny references to ideas you want to try, with a few notes on why they worked. The pruning is the part that turns scrolling into actual learning.
Where to Go Next
If you’re brand new and not sure which style fits, start with our what is a junk journal overview and the how-to-make-a-junk-journal walkthrough. For more specific ideas to fill your journal across styles, browse 88 junk journal ideas. Once you’ve picked a style and want to build pages in it, our guide to junk journal pages covers the anatomy and eight building techniques that work across every style on this list. And when you’re ready to invest in materials, the junk journal supplies guide covers what’s worth buying first.
The pull toward a particular style is information. Don’t override it because something else is trending. Make ten spreads in the style that excited you most when you read this post and your work will move further in a month than scrolling another year of inspiration ever would.