How to Start an Art Journal When You Think You Can't Draw

How to Start an Art Journal When You Think You Can’t Draw (October 2026)

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Yes, you can art journal even if you genuinely cannot draw. An art journal is a place to combine words, color, tape, stamps, torn paper and found objects, and none of that requires a recognizable object or a steady hand. What follows is a plan for your first five pages, a toolkit of techniques that need no drawing at all, and a way to keep going on the days you would rather not.

I want to be upfront about something first. I cannot draw. My people are outlines, my trees look like brooms, and I abandoned every attempt at art class by age twelve. The pages in my current art journal are mostly collage, paint, lettering and a lot of tape.

That is the entire point. Most people who say they want to art journal are not trying to become illustrators. They want somewhere private to put a messy week, somewhere that does not ask them to perform. The drawing is optional, and once you know that, the blank page stops being a threat.

This guide covers what art journaling actually is, why “I can’t draw” is the wrong thing to worry about, what you need to start (which may be nothing), twelve ways to fill a page with no drawing involved, a five-day starter plan, prompts for when you have no ideas, and how to fix the common messes. I have pulled a few of these from the places beginners actually ask, including the r/bulletjournal crowd who swear by washi tape and the 2Peas Refugees forum thread on creative talent.

Table of Contents

What Art Journaling Actually Is (and Isn’t)

Art journaling is an open-ended art practice, usually in a bound book or on loose paper, that combines writing, images, color and found materials. It is focused on the process and on what the page does for you, not on producing a finished piece anyone would hang on a wall.

Three words carry most of the meaning. Mixed media means combining more than one material on a page, so paint plus paper plus pen. Ephemera, sometimes called journal fodder, means the collected bits you keep for pasting later: ticket stubs, receipts, tea bags, magazine fragments, packaging, old maps. Collage is the act of gluing those bits down, and tearing paper usually looks better than cutting it.

Here is what it is not. It is not a drawing class, it is not something you can fail at, and it is not judged by anyone. It is also not the same as regular journaling, which is one of the most common points of confusion.

The difference between art journaling and regular journaling is the visual layer. A regular journal page is words on paper. An art journal page holds words, color, texture, image and found objects together, and either half can dominate. Plenty of art journalers write three sentences and tape down a receipt, and that counts as a complete page.

That matters because the most common complaint I see from beginners is not “I can’t draw.” It is “I have nothing to put in my journal, and I don’t want it to be just writing.” The visual layer is what people are actually missing.

Why “I Can’t Draw” Is the Wrong Problem

Not being able to draw accurately is an accuracy problem, not a talent problem. Most people who believe they cannot draw are measuring themselves against illustrators who spent years training their hands. On the 2Peas Refugees forum, one beginner put it plainly: you do not have to draw to art journal, because stencils, stamps, doodles, blobs and torn paper are all valid ways to fill a page.

A commenter in the r/ArtistLounge thread on people who thought they could never draw put the diagnosis more precisely. The obstacle is training in accuracy, not a missing gift. That is good news, because training is optional for a journal that is not trying to be a portfolio.

What is actually blocking you is almost never skill. It is one of these four things:

  • Perfectionism. The page has to look good, so you never start. The blank page stays blank for months.
  • Fear of ruining a nice journal. You bought something beautiful and you are afraid to open it, so you keep waiting until you are good enough.
  • No starting point. You have supplies, a plan in mind, and no idea what page one looks like.
  • Nobody to compare to. Every reference you see is a finished piece by someone who has practiced for years.

Practical permission slips

These are tactics real beginners use, and they work because they change what a page is for.

Make fake pages first. Work on a single loose sheet of paper. If you like it, paste it into the journal. If you hate it, the good journal never saw it. A commenter on one popular art journaling guide described exactly this and it remains the best advice I have read on the subject.

Close the page you cannot stand. Put repositionable washi tape across the top, bottom and middle of a page that offends you, and write over it. The journal stays intact and the page is no longer staring at you every time you open the cover.

Date every page. A dated page is a record, not an artwork. Once it has a date on it, you stop expecting it to be good, because its job is to have existed on that day.

Use repetition when your mind is too loud. People on r/Journaling who say they do not really draw described making rows of identical marks, stripes or dots to shut their thinking off. That is a legitimate art journal page and it is genuinely calming.

Give yourself permission to make it bad. Out loud, once. The pages in your journal are not going to be graded, shared or seen by anyone unless you choose to show them.

What You Actually Need to Start

The honest answer is almost nothing. A working art journal kit has four parts, and the first one costs you the price of a single object you probably already own.

  1. A surface. Any paper: loose printer paper, index cards, the back of a junk mail envelope, the flattened box a delivery came in. A bound book is nicer but it is not required.
  2. Something to mark with. A ballpoint pen, pencil, marker, crayon or brush pen. A cheap set of colored pencils or gel pens is enough.
  3. Something to color with. Watercolor, acrylic, gouache, or even a highlighter. One paint is plenty to start.
  4. Something to glue and something to lay down. A glue stick or tape, plus scrap paper, magazine fragments, washi tape, stickers or receipt paper for collage.

You can start tonight with paper and a pen. The zero-supply path is real: tear up an envelope, write three lines about your day in whatever pen is nearest, and underline one of them. That is page one and nobody can tell you it does not count.

Art journaling on a budget works the same way. Dollar store journals, thrift store frames with the glass removed, mixed-media paper pads and spare tubes of paint from a kid’s craft kit all do the job. If you want paint without buying paint, a wax crayon, a highlighter or a black marker makes marks that behave like ink.

Choosing your journal

Picking a book is where beginners stall, because the choice feels like a commitment. Here is how the main options compare, cheapest and most flexible first.

  • Loose paper, index cards or cardboard. Lowest cost, no skill needed, and ideal for trying it out, practicing fake pages and committing to nothing.
  • Composition notebook. Low cost, no skill needed, cheap mixed media, lined pages plus a blank back for art.
  • Sketchbook. Medium cost, no skill needed, takes heavier media and paint, and pages that lie flat when open.
  • Blank art journal. Medium to high cost, no skill needed, full pages with no lines fighting your layout.
  • Junk journal. Cost varies, no skill needed, collage-heavy pages made mostly from found paper.
  • Altered book or artist’s book. High cost, moderate skill for the assembly, a project you build yourself and best left until a few months in.

Whatever you choose, decide now that you are allowed to abandon it. daisyyellowart’s Art Journaling 101 makes the same point from the other direction: you can keep several journals going at once, and not finishing one is a normal outcome rather than a failure. The most common sentence I hear from beginners is some version of “I have three art journals, all unfinished.” Three unfinished journals means three times you sat down and made a page.

For a total beginner I would start with a composition notebook or a cheap mixed-media pad, because the paper takes paint without warping and the price will not make you protective of it.

12 Ways to Fill a Page Without Drawing

What to draw when you cannot draw: you do not have to draw anything. You can fill an entire page with color, paper, tape, found text, letters, stamps and texture, and not one of those techniques asks your hand to produce a cat, a face or a flower. Here are twelve, each doable in a single sitting.

  1. Washi tape lines. Lay three or four strips of tape in a grid, drop paint or ink over the top, peel it off, and write in the gaps. Straight lines and right angles are the easiest composition there is.
  2. Torn paper collage. Tear paper instead of cutting it. The soft white edge reads as intentional and nobody can measure your cutting accuracy.
  3. Magazine cutouts. Find three words in a magazine that describe your week and glue them down in a row. Font does the visual work for you.
  4. Rubber stamps. One inked stamp, repeated eight times in a pattern, turns into a full page with zero drawing. Overlap them and vary the rotation.
  5. Stencils. Letters, numbers, leaves, grids. Stencils are the 2Peas Refugees answer to “I have no skill,” and they are right.
  6. Tissue paper. Scrunch it, dip it in water, press it onto the page, and peel the color back off. You get a soft mottled background from a process, not from a result.
  7. Tape resist. Mask a shape with tape, paint over it, remove the tape. The exposed paper stays white and reads as a deliberate outline you did not have to draw.
  8. Color blocking. Pick three colors and fill irregular sections with them. Decide the shapes with your hand moving fast, or with a pencil held flat like a straightedge.
  9. Found text. Receipts, ticket stubs, boarding passes, the back of a label. Glue them down and connect them with lines or arrows. You are documenting, not composing.
  10. Lettering. Write one word, a date, or a sentence in large letters and treat each letter as a shape. Block capitals are forgiving because nobody expects them to look handwritten.
  11. Pressed botanicals. Flatten leaves and petals and tape them down. Nature supplies the drawing, which takes the pressure off you completely.
  12. Texture rubbings. Lay a leaf, a coin or a woodgrain surface under your paper and rub with the side of a crayon or a pencil stub. Instant texture, and every result is different.

Notice that none of these asks for an image of anything. They use color, paper, letterforms and objects you did not make, and they produce pages that look intentional to anyone who flips through the book later.

A useful constraint that turns any of these into a finished-feeling page: limit yourself to two colors plus black and white. Limitation reads as confidence, and it removes every decision about what goes where next.

Your First 5 Pages: A Five-Day Starter Plan

How to begin an art journal, concretely. Do one of these a day, in order. Each one takes between five and twenty minutes, and none of them requires you to decide anything in advance.

  1. Day 1, the tape grid. Fill one page with washi tape in a loose grid, drop one color of ink or paint over it, peel, and write the date in one corner. That is the whole page. It also gets the book open, which is the real goal.
  2. Day 2, three torn papers. Tear three pieces from a magazine, a junk mail envelope and any scrap you have. Glue them in a row and write one sentence under each about something that happened in the last week.
  3. Day 3, the color block. Pick three colors, fill four to six irregular sections, and stamp, stencil or tape a pattern into one of them. This is where mixed media starts, and the paint does not need to be neat.
  4. Day 4, the found-text page. Glue down three pieces of found text and connect them with lines, arrows or circles. Write a short paragraph beside it. This is your first real writing-plus-image page and it is the one people keep going back to.
  5. Day 5, the pattern page. Draw one small shape and repeat it across the page until it is full. Circles, lines, dots, waves, whatever your hand does without thinking. Add one line of writing at the bottom about how the week felt.

That is a complete art journal: a background, a collage page, a painted page, a writing page and a repetitive mark page. Five days, and the hardest part is opening the book on day one.

If you want the whole plan on one screen before you start, the five-minute version is this. Tape down a grid, tear three pieces of paper onto it, and write the date. Roughly five minutes, one page, no drawing.

15 Beginner Prompts When You Don’t Know What to Draw

What to do when you cannot think of anything to draw: stop trying to think of a drawing, and answer one of these instead. They are grouped by how much energy you have, because the prompts that work on a calm Sunday rarely work on a Tuesday night.

Low energy, ten minutes or less

  1. Trace your own hand.
  2. Scribble with your eyes closed, then fill in the shapes with color.
  3. Make one continuous line from one edge of the page to the other without lifting the pen.
  4. Copy the text of a page from a book you are reading.
  5. Tape down three things from your pocket or bag.

Steady energy, a full page

  1. Pick one color and fill the page with lines, dots or waves in that color only.
  2. Draw a small shape and repeat it into a pattern until the page is full.
  3. Make a list of ten small things you are grateful for, and give each one a square.
  4. Write a sentence in large block letters and color in the negative space around it.
  5. Build a word out of cut-up magazine letters.

Reflective energy

  1. Write the 3/2/1 method: three things you saw, two things you heard, one thing you felt today.
  2. Draw the view out of your window without aiming for accuracy. Buildings are rectangles.
  3. Make a page about a feeling using only one color, then write its name in large letters.

Brave energy

  1. Do a blind contour of a mug or a shoe. Look only at the object, not the paper, and let the line go where it goes.
  2. Draw something from memory without opening a reference.

The beginners on r/learntodraw who eventually got comfortable with drawing all describe the same path: shapes, shadows and simple forms first, not whole objects. That applies here too. Your first pages are shapes on purpose, and the accuracy training is optional.

How to Keep Going When Motivation Dies

Motivation is not the mechanism. Habit is, and habits are built on a floor low enough that you can clear it on your worst day.

Set a two-minute floor. Your only job is two minutes. Tape one strip down, write one line, draw one row of dots. When the timer ends you may stop, and about half the time you will keep going. The rule is that you never skip to zero.

Keep a low-energy page in the back. Designate the last five pages for sick days and bad weeks. Washi strips, washi samples, receipts, a scribble. Those pages are not filler; they are proof you kept the practice alive, and later they are the ones that make the book feel like a real record of a hard season.

Date every page. A dated page cannot be a failure, because its job was to exist on that date. This is the single simplest way to stop resenting your own work.

Accept unfinished journals. You do not have to finish an art journal. A half-full book that you used for two years is more meaningful than three pristine ones you abandoned in week two. If you outgrow a journal, start a new one and glue the old cover inside it, or just keep going in the same one with a fresh stack of pages taped to the back.

Build a fodder habit. Every time you empty your pockets, keep one piece of paper. Every coffee or shop visit, keep the receipt. Within a month you will have enough ephemera that you will never again complain about having nothing to cut up.

For anyone using art journaling to process anxiety, grief or burnout, the same logic applies with more force. The page is not an art project. It is somewhere to put something so it stops going around in your head, and on a day when you can only manage two minutes, two minutes of it still counts.

Common Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Almost every problem beginners hit has a simple cause and a simple fix. These are the ones that show up again and again in the comments under the popular guides.

  • Ink bleeds through to the next page. Usually thin paper plus a wet medium or a heavy marker. Use a heavier paper, a felt-tip with a broad tip, or work on a sheet and paste it in.
  • Paint makes pages gummy or stick together. Too much water or too wet a medium on absorbent paper. Use less water, let each layer dry fully, or prime with gesso first.
  • Acrylic or gesso runs into the spine. You worked right up to the binding. Mask a two-finger margin with tape and peel it when dry.
  • You ruined a two-page spread. You painted across both pages before the wet paint lifted. Work one page at a time, or cut the sheet in half and mount it separately.
  • Nothing to cut up. You never started a collection. Start the pocket-receipt habit, or use envelopes, paint chips and torn newspaper.
  • The page looks childish. You are comparing page one with a professional portfolio. Washi the page closed, date it, move on. It was practice, not a product.

A note on the spread problem, because it is the one that ends journals. If you only ever work on a single page and treat a two-page spread as two separate pages, you can never ruin both at once. Many book people do not do this naturally, and the habit takes about a week to form.

On gummies: the fix is dry time. Give a page a few hours or overnight before you close the book, and if it still sticks, a sheet of plain paper between the pages absorbs the moisture. This is normal for cheap paper and it is not a sign that you chose the wrong journal.

And on the page you hate: do not tear it out, because you will tear out the facing page with it. Washi it closed, write something on top, and keep going. The alternative, leaving a gap, is the reason journals look sparse and unfinished.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I art journal if I can’t draw?

Yes. Art journaling combines words, color, tape, stamps, stencils, torn paper, found text and found objects, and none of those need drawing skill. Most pages never contain a drawn image at all.

What to draw when I can’t draw?

Draw nothing. Fill the page with washi tape lines, torn paper collage, magazine words, repeated rubber stamps, stencils, tissue paper, tape resist, color blocks, found receipts, lettering, pressed leaves or crayon texture rubbings. Twelve techniques, zero required drawing.

How to begin an art journal?

Start with one page on day one. Tape down a grid, drop color over it, peel the tape and write the date. Then work through five days of simple pages: tape grid, torn paper collage, color block with a pattern, found text with writing, and a repeated-shape page.

What is the difference between art journaling and regular journaling?

Regular journaling is words on paper. Art journaling adds a visual layer: color, texture, image and found objects share the page with the writing. Either half can dominate, so a page with three sentences and a taped-down receipt is a complete art journal page.

What are some ideas for art journaling for beginners?

Beginners do well with constraints rather than blank pages. Trace your hand, repeat one small shape until the page is full, fill a page with lines in a single color, write a sentence in large block letters and color around it, or build a word from cut-up magazine letters.

What to do when you can’t think of anything to draw?

Stop trying to think of a drawing and answer a question instead. List three things you saw, two things you heard and one thing you felt today, or copy the text of a page from a book you are reading. Writing first usually unblocks the image.

Do I have to finish an art journal?

No. An unfinished journal you used for two years is worth more than three perfect ones you stopped using in week two. If you outgrow a book, start another and keep the old one, or tape fresh pages into the back of it.

Is a background necessary in an art journal?

No. Plenty of good pages are white paper with writing, tape and a few cut-out words on it. A painted or collaged background helps on some pages and is not required on any of them, so start without one and add backgrounds later if you want them.

What paper should I use for an art journal?

Choose paper heavier than printer paper if you plan to paint. A composition notebook or a mixed-media pad works for cheap mixed media, a sketchbook or blank art journal takes more water and paint, and loose paper or cardboard is fine for testing techniques before you commit to a book.

How do I stop being a perfectionist about my art?

Work on loose paper first and paste in only what you like. Date every page so its job is to have existed that day, and washi-tape over any page you hate instead of tearing it out. A dated record is not an artwork and cannot disappoint you.

How do I keep up an art journaling habit?

Set a two-minute floor so you never skip to zero, keep a low-energy page in the back of the journal for bad weeks, and put one piece of ephemera in your pocket every day so you always have material. Do it at the same time, even if it is two minutes.

Conclusion: Pick One Prompt and Do It Tonight

How to start an art journal when you think you can’t draw comes down to three things: a surface, a pen, and permission to make a page you do not like. Everything else is optional, including the drawing.

So do not plan a second page. Take one sheet of paper, tape a grid across it, drop a color over the top, peel the tape, and write today’s date in the corner. Five minutes, one page, and the hardest part of learning how to start an art journal is behind you.

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