| |

15 Inspiring Drawing Journal Ideas

Drawing Journal Ideas Offering you an inspiring series of fifteen drawing journal ideas to help your student or homeschooler create, draw, and design something new and unique in their art journal.

Drawing Journal Prompts for Students

Drawing and art journals differ from writing journals and often start out with blank pages of craft paper or art paper handmade by the artist. Whether your students pick a one-off drawing idea or an idea that leads to a collection of artworks, anyone 8 to eighteen can draw inspiration from this list.

Help children and teens put their pencil—in a kaleidoscope of colors or charcoal black—to paper more creatively without needing any additional art supplies.

Establishing an art practice is much easier when you get into the habit of doing something simple, like making and keeping a drawing journal or sketchbook. Our drawing journal ideas is a perfect place to start. Enjoy!

15 Inspiring Drawing Journal Ideas for Students

  1. Hand Drawn Stickers – Draw your most intriguing sticker ideas on a sheet of cardstock…perhaps even using colored markers and glitter glue pens for sparkle. Use a sheet of sticker paper with sticky backing to make actual stickers, or cut out and glue the cardstock stickers to sticker paper. Decorate your drawing journal using these stickers or maintain a collection of sticker ideas drawn in your journal.
  2. Coin Play – Take a quarter and outline it on a page. Do this several more times. Within these circles, create a series of fashionable buttons, facial expressions, flowers, planets, or hard candy.
  3. Drawing the Seasons – Four seasons, four pages, Draw every image, from sunshine to snow showers, that represents autumn, spring, summer, and winter for you personally.
  4. Drawing the Outdoors – Continuing with this idea, get natural with it! Go outside. Sit down. Draw the world in front of you.
Drawing Journal Painting Prompt
Painting provided by reader Natalie
  1. Design Your Own Poster – Create a pretend poster for saving the environment. Get green, be eco-friendly, and spread the message by making digital copies and sharing your art online.
  2. Bullet Journal Play – Start a bullet journal within your drawing journal. Draw a themed calendar along with a key for bullet symbols and meanings in a colorful or black-and-white spread for the month. A spread can include mood, water drinking and running trackers, or single-word mantras like “You are Wonderful!” doodled over an entire page.
  3. Pretty Page Borders – Design border pages for some of the art journal page. These are frames for single, small works of art or the lettering of poems or mantras. Each border can be square, rectangle, oval, circular, or oblong in shape. They should be designed using something more than just a single line, such as with ivy vines, rows of tiny crayons–or the aerial view of a village where each house is drawn around the edge of the frame.
Ideas for Drawing Journals
  1. Mood Tracking Chart – Draw a mood chart that lets you keep up with how you are feeling each day. Use colors, signifiers, and images to represent your mood every day over a month. Keep up with this in your drawing journal.
  2. Lovely Lettering – Practice your handwriting. Lettering is the art of drawing really fancy words in script like cursive, but also in block print and other graphic illustrations.
  3. Get Buggy! – Make up your own bugs! Go buggy and cover an entire page with drawings of insects. Stick with bugs that are from memory or your imagination.
Drawing Journal Idea 1
Drawing provided by reader Anika
Drawing Journal Painting Prompt #2
Painting provided by reader Natalie

11. Fabulous Florals – Long-stemmed roses, over-sized bouquets of snowballs, and voluptuous tulips, oh my! Use colored pencils to draw your forever-bouquet of such floral favorites. (Check out these 25 Wonderful Writing About Flowers Prompts for more inspiration!)

Drawing Journal Idea 2
Drawing Journal Idea 3
Drawing Journal Painting Prompt
Painting provided by reader Natalie
  1. “Refreshing” Your Sketch – Grab a carbonated beverage—be it in a bottle or a cup—and start sketching. Extra points for a collection that includes many types of beverages and drinkware.
  2. Step By Step – Show step by step how to draw something. Pick an easy object like a lemon, rock crystal, tree, dog, lightbulb, or flamingo.
  3. The Ideal Tablescape – Go back into the kitchen and draw your ideal tablescape. Think of the designs for plates and how you will arrange these, along with water, wine and coffee glasses, and silverware settings. Don’t forget the centerpiece! Flowers, balloons, pumpkins, and soup bowls all work wonderfully but think outside of the gourds. Toy tractors, pheasants, Coca-Cola bottles—whatever you wish you could see in the morning at your breakfast table.
  4. Language Play – Think of a language other than your own. Go look up an introductory level list of words and phrases. If you do not already speak one of these languages, choose Chinese, Japanese, or another language from Asia that has characters you draw or use lettering to illustrate a Latin or Germanic language. Add language learning to your many skills that are now being picked up thanks to your drawing journal.

A Few Closing Thoughts

Art and drawing journals often start out with blank pages of craft paper or art paper handmade by the artist. This differs from writing journals, which use lined notebook paper or computer-printed text. When students are making art and drawing journals, their focus is more on color, texture, material, and medium, rather than writing words to make sentences. Students gain in art practice as they make a personalized art book.

An art and drawing journal gives students a perspective on how they have progressed and what they have learned in their art practice. Consider having your student start at least one art/drawing journal this year, even if they already keep a writing journal.

As a practice, they could also use the ideas on this list of drawing journal ideas to make an illustration that leads up to a story they can later add to their writing journal. Ultimately, students pick up their own freedom of expression and a chance to learn a new skill when they have a drawing journal.

We hope you enjoyed and found inspiration from this list of drawing journal ideas!

Until next time, journal on…

If you enjoyed these Drawing Journal Ideas,
please share them on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Pinterest.
I appreciate it!

Sincerely,
Jill
journalbuddies.com
creator and curator

Drawing Journal Ideas for Kids
------------Start of Om Added ---------
------------End of Om Added ---------