SKETCH BOOK PROMPTS:

• Go to artprompts.org and click on the "character," "situation,"  "creature," "challenge," "environment," or "object" button.  

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​5o things to draw when you don’t know what to draw:

1. 3 animals wearing clothes
2. A page of worms
3. Practice drawing your thumb in different positions
4. Blind contour drawing of your bed
5. Draw your dinner
6. Cut a rectangle out of a piece of paper, tape it to a window, and draw only what is inside of the rectangle
7. Set up an impromptu still life using 5 things in your pantry or cabinets
8. Trace around your hand and then go in and try to make it look like something other than a hand drawing
9. Draw a mug with someone or something peeking out of the top
10. Make up some underwater creatures
11. Fill a page with only a section of an animal
12. Turn your initials into a drawing of some sort of food
13. Separate your entire page with 6 lines, then fill in the spaces with different patterns
14. Draw something using only dots
15. Clouds
16. A hat
17. Draw a self portrait using pencil, and smudge it with your fingers so it’s as blurry as you can make it
18. Big huge cartoon eyes
19. Draw the outline of something without using lines. You have to just use the edge of a pencil to shade around where the object outline would be
20. Draw a skeleton the best you can, just from memory
21. Stacks and stacks of cars
22. Draw the simple house shape you used to draw as a kid, but then fill it in with tons of details
23. Half your face, half someone else’s – it can be a magazine face
24. Draw something (object or still life) using all cross hatching
25. Fill your page with stars, then fill in all the negative space
26. Cut out eyes, noses, and mouths from a magazine, tape them onto your page, and copy them
27. Draw a basic face shape on your page, then separate it into lots of geometric shapes to color in or draw patterns in
28. Write your name in the center of the page, then draw things, people, ideas, whatever that you love around your name
29. Splatter ink, watercolor, tea, what-have-you on your page and turn it into something cool
30. Cut shapes out from magazines and use them to ‘draw’ something on a sketchbook page
31. Find an image of an old master painting, and copy it into your sketchbook
32. Make a simple line drawing, then write all over the top of it- try to ‘draw’ the words with beautiful lines
33. Find some texture that you like and do a few close-up studies of it in your sketchbook
34. Use liquid ink or a Sharpie to draw a black animal silhouette then use a white gel pen to draw its skeleton over the black
35. Draw all the flowers you can think of without looking at any reference pictures (or flowers). Make ’em up if you wish
36. Make a page full of copied logos
37. Start with a tiny circle in the center of your page, then draw outward, filling your page with tiny drawings
38. Hands, hands, and more hands
39. Fill the page with a grid and draw as many insects as you can think of (or make up)
40. Draw the cover of your favorite book or album art
41. 2 circles- shade one to look like a ball, and the other to look like a hole
42. Draw an object, but personify it by giving it a face
43. Spoons and forks
44. Inside corner of a room
45. Outside corner of a building
46. Marbles
47. Crumpled paper – bonus points for shining a light on it from the side so yo have dramatic lighting
48. Glass of water with or without ice
49. Scribble, scribble, scribble
50. Tree and fill in the trunk area with a really unusual pattern.