40 Art Journaling Prompts Facilitators Use, Grouped by Purpose

Ten people, a long table, a stack of magazines and forty-five minutes of silence broken only by scissors. Then a round where each person says two sentences about their page and nobody says anything about anybody else's. That is a creative journaling session from the doorway, and the craft of facilitating one is in the choice and order of three or four prompts. Here are forty our faculty use, sorted by purpose, with the rules for sequencing them.

This is a working list for facilitators and for people deciding whether facilitation is for them. For what the field is, read our overview of expressive arts facilitation training. For where the legal line sits between what we do and licensed art therapy, see our article on the legal line between the two.

What makes a good art journaling prompt?

A good prompt gives a constraint and leaves the content open. 'Draw your week as weather' is a prompt; 'draw something meaningful' is a blank page with extra pressure. Our expressive arts course notes describe every device with four fields: duration, materials, instructions, purpose. The vision-board device, for instance, is one hour, an A3 card, magazines, scissors and glue, with the instruction to assemble images of what you love, your projects and your hopes, and a note that it belongs in the first sessions because collage removes the fear of the blank page.

That is the pattern behind all forty prompts below. Each pairs an image action (draw, collage, paint, blackout) with a word action (a stem, a list, a caption), because the notes list writing's benefits separately: externalising thoughts and feelings, taking distance from them, being in a dialogue with yourself, being in the present moment.

Which 40 prompts do facilitators actually use?

Eight per group. Times cover the making phase only; the round adds 10 to 20 minutes.

Arrival: settling into the room (5 to 12 minutes each)

1. Draw the weather inside you right now. One colour, no words yet. Then one caption.
2. Fill the page with a single repeated mark (dots, dashes, loops) for four minutes. Notice when your hand wants to change.
3. Tear, do not cut, three shapes from a magazine and place them anywhere. Title the page.
4. Write the sentence 'Today I arrived with…' and finish it five different ways. Circle one.
5. Scribble with your non-dominant hand for two minutes, then find one shape in it and outline it.
6. Draw the sound of the room as a line that runs off both edges of the page.
7. Cover a page in one wash of watercolour. While it dries, list three things you left outside the door.
8. Choose one word from a magazine at random and build the page around it, image first, meaning later.

Emotion: naming what is present (10 to 20 minutes each)

1. Give a feeling you have had this week a colour, a texture and a size. Make it on the page at that size.
2. Draw a container (jar, box, bowl) and put in it, as images or words, what you are carrying. Draw the lid last, open or closed.
3. Blackout poetry: take a page of a discarded book and black out everything except the words that describe today.
4. Draw two doors. Behind one, what you want more of. Behind the other, what you want less of. No interpretation.
5. Paint a feeling as terrain seen from above: where are the hills, the water, the roads?
6. Write a letter to an emotion as if it were a visitor. Where would you seat it? What would you offer it?
7. Collage the face of the day, from magazine fragments only. Name the expression in one word.
8. Draw the line of your energy from waking until now. Mark the moment it changed direction.

Memory: revisiting without reliving (12 to 20 minutes each)

1. Draw the floor plan of a place you felt safe as a child. Mark with an X where you would sit now.
2. A photo you no longer own: describe it in five lines, then draw only its background.
3. Collage a table set for a meal you remember. Who was there? Place a shape for each person.
4. Draw a road you took often and something you passed every time and never looked at.
5. Write the first line of a story that begins 'The year I…' and illustrate only the first line.
6. Draw an object you kept longer than it was useful. Write why underneath, in one sentence.
7. Map a friendship as a river: source, bends, where it widened or went underground.
8. Draw the view from a window you used to look out of. Add what you were waiting for.

Body: attention below the neck (10 to 25 minutes each)

1. On a body outline, paint the path of your breath in watercolour. Where does the colour thin?
2. Trace your hand. Inside each finger, write one thing that hand did today.
3. Draw where you hold tension as a knot, then draw the same knot loosened by one turn.
4. Choose a texture (sandpaper, fabric, leaf) and make a rubbing. Write what part of you it matches.
5. Draw your posture as a building. What would you reinforce? What is decorative?
6. Colour a body outline in temperatures only: warm where you feel warm, cool where cool.
7. Draw the shape of your voice today, from the throat outward.
8. Make a mark for each step of a short walk you took, then look at the rhythm of the marks.

Future: rehearsing what is next (12 to 30 minutes each)

1. Collage a Tuesday afternoon one year from now. Ordinary, not ideal.
2. Draw a bridge. Name the near bank and the far bank. Do not draw what is under it.
3. Write ten things you would keep if you moved tomorrow; draw the three you are least sure of.
4. Draw a door you have not opened yet and the handle only, in detail.
5. Make a map with one known road and the rest blank. Add a single landmark you can see from here.
6. A postcard from your future self: image on one side, three sentences on the other.
7. Draw a seed and, separately, the plant. Leave the space between them empty, on purpose.
8. Collage a toolkit: five images of what you will need next. Caption each with one verb.

How does a facilitator sequence prompts in a 90-minute session?

One arrival prompt, one working prompt, one short integrating prompt, then the verbal round, with the frame set before anyone picks up a pen. Our course notes divide every device into a creative phase and a verbal return, and list five elements of the frame: the place (with material and pages put away between sessions for confidentiality), the time (clear start, duration and rhythm), the space (no visitors, phones off), the relationship (non-judgement) and the rules of confidentiality. Set those in the first five minutes, every time.

1. 1

   Frame (5 min)

   State the time, the no-comment rule, the right to pass in the round, and that pages stay with their owner. Phones away.

2. 2

   Arrival prompt (10 min)

   One arrival prompt. Its only job is to get every hand moving before anyone judges their skill.

3. 3

   Working prompt (30 to 35 min)

   One prompt from emotion, memory, body or future. New groups get emotion or future; memory and body wait until the third or fourth session.

4. 4

   Integrating prompt (10 min)

   A short instruction that closes the page: a title, a caption, one sentence starting 'What I notice is…'. This is where distance and dialogue with oneself happen.

5. 5

   Verbal round (20 min)

   Each person, in turn, two sentences about their own page and process. The facilitator reflects back the person's words and never adds a meaning. Anyone may pass.

6. 6

   Close (5 min)

   Pages closed, materials returned, one breath together. Note in your own journal who passed and what you would change.

What materials does a group session need?

Fewer than people expect. The course notes on choosing media start from the question 'what do you want to do with the people you accompany?' and match materials to the group's age and sensitivity. One small kit per person covers all forty prompts.

Clay and large canvases are left off on purpose: journaling is a page-sized practice. Its circular cousin, the mandala, has its own session structure, covered in our article on mandala meaning and facilitation.

Why is there a rule against interpreting someone else's page?

Because interpretation turns a facilitator into an analyst. Our course notes put it plainly in the section on the person-centred approach: the facilitator 'does not seek to interpret or direct the artistic production, but to create a climate of trust conducive to free expression', and the medium is 'a means of inner exploration, not a tool of diagnosis'. A page of black scribbles means whatever its maker says it means.

Three parts in practice: participants do not comment on each other's pages; the facilitator reflects back the maker's own words only; nobody is required to explain. 'I'd rather not say' completes the round.

When is a prompt too heavy for a group?

When it names a specific loss, injury or person the participant did not choose. 'Draw the room where it happened' is not a prompt; it is a request for a disclosure in front of nine strangers. The memory and body prompts above approach those areas sideways (a floor plan, a window, a texture), so the participant decides how close to go. Even so, we hold them back until a group has met three or four times, and never use them in a one-off public workshop.

Signs it was too heavy: a participant stops and stares; someone leaves and does not come back for ten minutes; the round goes silent after one share. The response: return to the frame, offer an arrival prompt to the whole group, speak to the person privately afterwards, and write it in your session journal.

This is what the creative journaling module teaches: prompt design, image-and-word pairing, the 60-to-90-minute group arc, the one-to-one rhythm. It runs 2 classroom days and is included in our expressive arts facilitation program, which runs 15 in-person days (105 teaching hours) for $4,200.