Ideas to fill your notebook - Part 3

What doodles will you add to your blank pages?

In this final part of this short series of posts offering suggestions for ways to make use of your notebooks and sketchbooks, we tackle the tricky letters towards the end of the alphabet. See what catches your eye...

s) Sketching  - of course, this can be almost anything related to your art practice. Have a go at drawing something familiar without taking the pencil off the page, find a tutorial online and challenge yourself to try something detailed or look out of the window and draw what you can see today. Of course, you don’t have to use a pencil...be brave and draw with a pen, explore the loose lines you can achieve with ink or watercolours, break out the felt tips and crayons that are lurking in the back of drawer. Go on, make your mark!

t) Timeline - draw a winding line back and forth across a double page spread and use it as guide to record events in a sequence. This could be related to your family tree, working out your career history before tackling writing a new CV, or plotting out a new story that is waiting to be written.

u) Unknown words - make your own dictionary or simply start of collection of interesting or unfamiliar words. These could be related to a specific topic that you are interested in, vocabulary lists for a new language you are learning or interesting words from a word-of-the-day website or calendar. Hopefully you won’t develop hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- which is, of course, a very long word for having a fear of long words :-)

v) Visual Journal - how about actually printing some of the photos you take on your phone? Add them to a journal or photo album to share with friends and family, collect magazine images that that spark your next creative expression, or create colour swatches using all your art supplies so you have a visual record of the rainbows you can create.

w) Writer’s Notebook - collect snippets of conversations overheard in cafes, lyrics from your favourite songs, first and last lines from famous stories, or notes and ramblings for your own story ideas, poems or songs. These notebooks quickly become a treasure trove of inspiration and a repository for all sorts of nuggets of literary genius.

x) Exercises (sorry, best I could come up with!) - try out some writing prompts to add a spark of randomness to your writing practice. There are some great writing courses available for free via podcast or you could join a creative art challenge on social media which provides a word prompt for every day for a month. Doing just 10 minutes a day of something creative for no other reason than that it IS creative can be good for our wellbeing and provide a brief breathing space in our otherwise hectic lives. Treat yourself to 10 minutes.

y) ‘YES’ list - oh yes! It’s time to write down all those things that you know you would make you shout ‘YES!’ if an opportunity arose...think big, think wild or keep it small and simple. It’s your list so you choose.

z) Zendoodle or Zentangle-inspired art - check out Pinterest or search online and you will find a wealth of tutorials, inspiration and resources to guide you through the process of creating these intricate black and white patterned designs. Add one to the corner of each page in your journal or supersize them to fill a whole page in your sketchbook. Could you be a rebel and add a little colour?

So there you have it - an entire alphabet of inspiration and suggestions to get you started on filling those pesky blank pages. I hope you find something that sparks your interest - maybe you will try writing, creating art or collecting things to stick into your book. Whatever you choose, it will be uniquely and wonderfully yours!