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Photo by Rachael Gorjestani

There you are, hanging out with your sketchbook, ready to get all arty, and suddenly your brain freezes.

Your gnarled fingers clamp down on your pencil, and you let out an awkwardly loud screech of angst. You need ideas.

I've got yer sketchbook ideas, fella. All the sketchbook ideas you could possibly want (well 50 of them, at least.)

Plus, an extra bonus section for tips on how to switch up your sketchbook to make it even more exciting and fun.

These ideas will appeal to current sketchbook-lovers as well as those just getting started, and you weirdo art students and teachers will find all sorts of easy drawing ideas that you can make more complicated to challenge yourselves further.

Let's jump on into the sketchbook ideas, including a printable drawing ideas list download you can access.

Further down the page, you can find tips for breathing some new life into your sketchbook if you're in a rut or tend to approach every page the same way. (Guilty)

(If you still can't decide on your perfect sketchbook, this will help you choose.)

50 Sketchbook Ideas

1. 3 animals wearing clothes

2. a long, full page of a worm

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. Underwear

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 color 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 makeup)

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 you have dramatic lighting

48. A glass of water with or without ice

49. Scribble, scribble, scribble

50. Tree and fill in the trunk area with a really unusual pattern

Printable Drawing Ideas List

Click here to download a printable version of this list.

Tips for Making Your Sketchbook More Fun

Try to limit yourself to shorter sketches on some of your pages, especially if you tend to approach each sketchbook page like it needs to be a masterpiece! You can set a timer for 5 minutes for a few pages, and limit yourself to filling 5 pages each in 5 minutes time. (You can always go back in later and add more.)

Try your hand at different media. Sometimes it's fun to sketch the same thing on 3 different pages, in 3 different materials: try a pencil, pen, crayon.

Switch up your style sometimes. Usually, draw Manga? Try setting up a small still life or doing a self-portrait as realistically as you can.

Always draw landscapes? Draw a few pages of your beloved sleepy dog. (You don't need to show anyone these pages if you hate them.)

Change your position. Try standing up and drawing with your sketchbook propped up on the wall, and drawing with your non-dominant hand.

We tend to get comfortable and closed up while sitting with our sketchbook nestled up close to us, and just making these physical adjustments sometimes can make us approach our sketching session with fresh eyes.

Warm-up your hands and brain by making some big, stupid scribbles on a piece of paper for a minute or two before you tackle the sketchbook.

Take 10 deep breaths or meditate for a few minutes before you begin. You want to approach your sketchbook with a sense of presence and actually enjoy what you're doing.

By all means, go check out my list of 100 drawing ideas for kids, because you'll no doubt find some more great sketchbook ideas there you'll want to try.

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Photo by Rachael Gorjestani There you are, hanging out with your sketchbook, ready to get all arty, and suddenly your brain freezes. Your gnarled fingers clamp down on your pencil, and you let out an awkwardly loud screech of angst. You need ideas. I've got yer sketchbook ideas, fella.

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Marker, colored pencils, pen and ink...

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I have been creating sketchbook pages for years, and I wanted to share some of my techniques and inspiration with you as fuel for your sketchbook. If you are new to the sketchbooking world, a sketchbook is just any sort of blank book (ranging from spiral notecards to large books of high-grade paper) that a person transforms into a sort of visual diary.

Other people's sketchbook pages fascinate me, as do my own from the past. As a fair warning, in a few years you may look back at some of your pages and cringe ( what was I thinking?!), but others you will be glad you created.

There are a couple of books that strongly inspired me as I created my sketchbooks: Sabrina Ward Harrison's Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself and Lynne Perrella's Artists' Journals and Sketchbooks: Exploring and Creating Personal Pages. Both influenced me in different ways; I appreciate Sabrina Ward Harrison's openness and ability to spread feeling on a page. Lynne Perrella's work is a compilation of different artists' pages, along with a few how-tos such as ink transfers and binding techniques.

My own sketchbook pages reflect different methods I become obsessed with (e.g. stamping, drawing photos) and feelings. I hope that they will be valuable to you as inspiration for your own sketchbook pages!

This sketchbook page aims to capture a moment in time. It's a pen and watercolor drawing of my grandparents' kitchen in Denver. I recall pleasant memories when I look at this page. I used a gel pen to create this, and the pleasant gray tones were achieved simply by painting water over the ink. The ink merges on its own accord with the water. Light watercolor was used for the other tones.

This page is a good example of a hybrid sketchbook scrapbook page. It incorporates a newspaper clipping, stamps, and a theme of time and steps to outline my feelings concerning graduating from high school.

I used to conduct sketchbook collaborations/trades with friends, where I would draw a few elements and an artistic friend would fill in the rest (or vice versa). This is a great way to incorporate new ideas and styles into your sketchbook pages. The above page is my favorite product of our collaborations.

Any sketchbook has to have a healthy dose of angst. This page utilizes creepy vintage imagery to get its message across. The "BE MYSTERIOUS" was created with a white-out pen outlined in black gel ink, and the background is comprised of a page from an old atlas.

Feel free to utilize 3D elements in your sketchbook pages, as I have done above! I found the plastic sun and let the page develop around that with stamps, stylized text, and scrap paper.

Keep an eye out for interesting materials you can use. I found a printed piece of paper with a lot of characters on it and immediately saw potential. It reminded me of Monopoly, a game of luck and randomness. I added vintage and modern pictures for visual interest.

I love drawing around vintage elements. This man was taken out of an antique photography book - he lends amazing contrast to the colorful room. In this page, the green butterflies signify positive experiences; and the gray butterflies denote negative experiences.

A lot of people use sketchbook pages to document their travels. I would love to create a travel sketchbook one day using found elements from different countries I visit. This page reminds me of sitting in a Dublin hostel as a gifted Frenchman drew me. After he gave me the drawing, I returned to the US and added these interesting random elements.

This is my favorite sketchbook page of all time - and also a print for sale in my store. I took my sketchbooking operation to Starbucks in my hometown of Colby, Kan., and I used oil pastels, Starbucks brochures, and strong brewed coffee provided by the baristas to create the page. I am a big fan of using brewed coffee for an amazing yellowed finish. Wait for the coffee to dry, then layer on more to add visual interest. Vivid primary colors interact well with the coffee finish to create an aesthetically pleasing page.

I hope that these sketchbook pages have left you with some inspiration to create (or add to) your own sketchbook! I'd absolutely love to see what's in your sketchbook, or what these pages prompt you to create. Feel free to leave links in the comments, or email your page(s) to [email protected] . If I receive enough pages, I'd love to create a compilation blogpost.
What are some of your favorite sketchbooking techniques? What topics do you sketchbook about?

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