Editorial note: This article was originally published on My Inner Creative and has been updated and republished in May 2026 under The Vessel’s editorial standards.
A themed bullet journal trades a uniform aesthetic for a single visual world that runs through every page. Among the more long-running themes in the community, Alice in Wonderland sits near the top. The book has a deep set of recognisable images — a pocket watch, a rabbit hole, a tea table, a deck of cards, a grinning cat — and a colour palette that has been worked over by illustrators for more than a century. None of that requires any artistic skill to evoke. A handful of motifs in the margins of a page is enough.
The spreads collected below were originally featured on My Inner Creative as a survey of how journalers have used the Alice motif in their notebooks. They include cover pages, monthly headers, weekly logs, reading trackers, dream logs, and a number of larger illustrated pages. The visual world holds the practical pages of the notebook intact; what changes is the decoration around them, and the small accents that mark the spread as part of the same notebook from page to page.
Where the visual vocabulary comes from
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865, with the sequel “Through the Looking-Glass” following six years later. The visual canon that most journalers reach for is older than the Disney adaptation by nearly a century. It comes from John Tenniel, the English illustrator whose pen-and-ink drawings accompanied the original publication, and whose Alice — in a pinafore and headband, calm-faced among a crowd of impossible animals — has been the default visual reference for the books ever since.
The 1951 Disney animated film added a different visual layer, with its softer colours and more cartoon-style figures. Several of the spreads below draw from one tradition or the other; many draw from both at once. A black-and-white pen drawing tends to read as Tenniel; soft pastels with rounded figures tend to read as Disney. The vocabulary is broad enough that journalers can stay close to whichever version of the book they grew up with.
One small technical note from the production history is worth carrying forward. Tenniel was so unhappy with the print quality of his illustrations in the first edition that Carroll withdrew it and commissioned a second printing. The corrected edition is what most readers have seen since.
Recognisable motifs in the gallery
A small set of images appears across the spreads below. The white rabbit holding a pocket watch; the watch itself, drawn loose at the edge of a page; the rabbit hole, sometimes literal and sometimes a stylised spiral; a teacup or a tea table; playing cards used as borders or page accents; the silhouette of a cat with a wide smile; a small key; a labelled bottle or a tiny iced cake; mushrooms; chess pieces. The motifs do not have to be drawn with technical skill to read as Alice; they are recognisable enough that even a rough sketch is unambiguous.
Colour palettes follow the visual tradition. Cool blues and pale pinks read as Disney; muted blacks and creams with the occasional red accent read as Tenniel. A combination of the two — a soft blue background with a Tenniel-style figure in the foreground — is also common in the gallery. None of the palettes are required; several of the most striking spreads below use only a single colour throughout, with the rest of the page in plain black pen.
Pages that make room for something other than productivity
A bullet journal is usually a practical object. Its most common pages — the monthly calendar, the weekly log, the habit tracker, the to-do list — are productivity tools, and most of the time the format is built to keep those tools efficient and easy to use. A themed notebook does not have to abandon any of that, but the theme is the place where the notebook is allowed to do something other than productivity. A page drawn in the Alice register is a page that takes a little longer to make and reads as a small piece of decorative art alongside its function.
The benefit of the slower pages is not measurable. They do not produce a better task list or a more accurate habit tracker. What they offer is a notebook that the journaler is more likely to come back to on weeks when there is no functional reason to do so — when the daily logging has fallen away, when the trackers are blank, when the only reason to open the book is that the book is a small piece of pleasure rather than a small piece of work. The Alice theme has lasted in the community because it does that well.
How journalers use the theme
Most of the practical pages in any bullet journal continue to appear inside an Alice-themed notebook — the monthly calendar, the weekly log, the habit grid, the reading tracker. The theme provides the header treatment, the colour palette, and a few small accent motifs around the margins. The underlying format stays intact, and a stranger flipping through the book would still understand what each page was for.
Beyond the practical pages, three uses recur. The first is a cover page or section divider — a single illustrated page that sits between months, used as a visual reset. The second is a reading or dream log, where the theme has an obvious thematic fit and where the journaler is already noting things they want to remember. The third is a freestanding illustrated spread, where the page is essentially a piece of artwork inspired by a particular scene in the book, with a small written reflection or a favourite line written alongside.
Featured Alice in Wonderland bullet journal spreads
The spreads below come from the My Inner Creative community. They span several years of journaling activity and represent a range of approaches to the theme — from a few marginal pen marks on an otherwise plain weekly log, to pages that are essentially finished illustrations with a line of text alongside them.
Two things are worth keeping in mind when looking through them. First, the quality of execution varies deliberately. These are not all showpiece pages; some are working notebooks with a light thematic touch, included because that kind of restrained use is actually more useful as a reference than the elaborate spreads. Second, the spreads are included as visual examples, not templates. The point is to see what choices other journalers made — which motifs they reached for, how much of the page they gave to decoration, whether they worked in colour or line only — rather than to reproduce any of them directly.
What the gallery shows collectively
Taken together, the spreads above make a case that the Alice theme is more flexible than it first appears. It works in a full-page illustration and in a two-minute pen sketch in the margin. It works in a reading log where the theme has an obvious fit and in a weekly habit tracker where the only thematic element is the header font and a single motif in the corner. The range of approaches visible here is the reason the theme has remained in active use in the community for as long as it has — there is no single correct version of it, and the barrier to a first attempt is lower than most of the more polished spreads suggest.
The journalers whose work appears above are not identified individually, as the spreads were collected as community examples rather than as attributed commissions. If you recognise your own work here and would like attribution added or the image removed, the contact details for this publication are on the contact page.
What the spreads above share, more than any particular motif, is a willingness to spend time on a page that is not strictly productive. The journaler who draws a pocket watch in the corner of a weekly log has spent five minutes on something that produces nothing in particular. That is most of what a themed notebook is for. The Alice register is one of the easier ways to give a notebook permission to do something other than the practical work it usually does, and the pages above are the part of the practice that has stayed around because that permission keeps mattering.
