Please share your favourite creative art/art journaling prompts

January 13, 2024 7:22 AM

Looking to put together a list of things I can do to warm up in my sketchbook or scrap paper or to get into a creative headspace and reduce the blank page don't know what to draw feeling.

I use paint, coloured pencils, pastels, pens/markers, whatever, I tend to gravitate toward a lot of colour (one of my favourite 'prompts' I found in the past has been to swatch materials on square pieces of paper to help put together colour palettes in new ways, I use those all the time now) but happy to think about things outside my comfort zone. Prompts I've tried in the past and enjoyed: limited/random palettes, blind contour drawing, self portraits, Keri Smith's interactive art books.

Links to artists who share these types of things, original ideas, videos, images, anything, all appreciated!

posted by chives to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

I still use the old school thing of drawing an object without looking at your drawing, and not lifting your pen/ crayon/ brush from the paper. A new prompt for me is painting random images...lines, blotches...amorphic shapes...dots on separate pieces of paper. Then cutting up the paper into various sizes. This enables me to make endless compositions by mixing the various swatches of cut up papers. I also employ my printer to print out copies, This gives me quantity to play with. I also use play dough to make designs on paper, flattened with my hand. And take photos and enlarge, crop, etc and make prints of those. I'm also recently using two part resin on silicon sheet. Dots, stripes, blobs again...when they dry in a day or two I easily peel them off and use these pieces to make compositions on paper ..again I can photograph, enlarge, crop and print them out. Hope this is helpful.
posted by Czjewel at 7:48 AM on January 13, 2024

there's a lot of good ones in this book
posted by wowenthusiast at 12:14 PM on January 13, 2024

You Are An Artist by Sarah Green, or her YouTube channel Art Assignment.
posted by ellerhodes at 1:22 PM on January 13, 2024

I like Lynda Barry’s four square method - divide up a page, and in the quadrants note things you did, things you saw, things you heard, and then a drawing
posted by slightlybewildered at 2:34 PM on January 13, 2024