Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 21 (2026) — May 17-23

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This week: Half-Stories ⭐ Illustrated Journal ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Fun Finds (Goblins) ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 A Half-Story

I have not been in this library in more than thirty years. I carry only the impression of a long rectangular building on a hill and the echo of the word ‘stacks’ as an anchor in memory. Nothing else. I arrived here today and found that my card still opened the door. All of the shelves were empty, and yet patrons were sitting at small tables by windows, surrounded by piles of open books.

Finding a free table on the second floor, I sat and pondered the empty shelves stretching in every direction. I had come looking for something undefined, something felt more than articulated, something I didn't know how to find. I couldn't have explained the certainty that ‘muses’ are important, a hinge in a system that has become difficult to maneuver. I planned to wander, scan spines as if reading a pile of cast bones, and see what books might surface. I planned to watch for foxes and wolves and signs of synchronicity.

As I sat, a woman at a nearby table closed a book and added it to a pile with two others. Grabbing a slip of paper, she wrote quickly, pausing only once to glance out the window before she continued. When finished, she tucked the slip inside the book and returned to her notes. The pile vanished, and a minute later, another book appeared. Picking it up, she seemed surprised and yet pleased as she studied the cover and then opened the small volume.

Dropping my eyes from the deep green of the book’s cover and her long silver hair, I looked at the table at which I sat. In the center, pushed to the edge against the wall, almost invisible in the bit of shadow, were a few slips of paper, a single half pencil, and a small placard that read:

No-Wander Search—6AM-Noon
List title, author, keyword, or emotional tenor.

Taking a slip of the paper, I started to write what I sought when a rustle blew through the room, the sound of thousands of dominos standing back up in sequence. The shelves were once again full of books as the clock struck twelve.

📌 Half-Stories

Evolve. Revolve. Devolve.
This week held contemplation of half-stories, a prismatic look from multiple angles, each refracting in different ways and from different starting points but bending back again toward the same center, and an unexpected study of regress and recursion.

1.
Imagine a Plinko machine, the kind next to the cakewalk.

If I start the ball here... where will it bounce to? Will it lead to a lollipop? A sonnet? A philosophical treatise disguised as a fairy tale? A haiku written in reverse? A reminder of darkness?

Pausing to contemplate the metaphor, I realize it will not do. There are not enough options. I don’t want a grid of a hundred or so. I want a grid of thousands of small pegs to interrupt and divert the path. I want to map variance and multiplicity, echoes and divergence. What if I start there? What if I drop two balls at once? What if there are embedded mirrors, pegs that are angled or bent, and paths that refuse to follow the rules of physics?

I enjoy the randomness of the path, the way words string, ideas connect, and constellations appear. If lines are drawn between the dots, the image will always be abstract, a moment that draws you back into the looping nature of the labyrinth.

But this is a half-story. It may be that this labyrinth has no center, no path that resolves to an exit, and no path back. There may be no final numbered dot. They may continue to appear, just as you think you’ve found the last one.

The ordinary Plinko machine does have an end. The ball will come to a rest at the bottom after an indeterminate number of bounces along an undetermined path. The fact that the ball might land in any slot and still make sense, still invite both horizontal allusions and vertical stacking with other balls, both semantic play and visual coherence, is exciting.

The ball can be dropped an infinite number of times.

Standing at the machine, day after day, and recording the starting point and where the ball lands is both observation and documentation. This is phenomenology. The path may be random, but the process of repeating the experiment and tracking variables and outcomes is a system. Patterns can be detected. Probabilities can be calculated.

But what if some paths are quietly inaccessible, and I don’t know until later? Is the path the ball took still valid? Or was it supposed to be different?

Am I winning a toy duck, a small wolf carving, or a tiny gnome at the bottom? Or am I describing a process by which something unknown unfolds from an origin point, and the path of the ricochet is the narrative thread?

2.
I keep finding tarot cards that I’ve left out to photograph or draw.

Sometimes after a reading, I’ll find a card stuck between the cushion and the chair, still in the bottom of the box, or mixed in with other cards. The elision is unintentional, but the pulls are sometimes from incomplete decks, and I am left to wonder if the story would have been the same regardless or if I skewed the narrative. If all the cards had been in the deck, would I have pulled something very different? I wonder, too, about the cards that seem to fly out of the deck. Sometimes I take them, and sometimes I just shuffle them back in.

Every pull is random, a shot in the dark, although the percentages are easy to figure. I’m not wholly convinced that the story isn’t roughly the same each time no matter what cards arrive. But finding cards that have been accidentally left out always makes me wonder.

3.
I gave myself a small task this week while walking around the block before heading into the library. It started as an exercise in noticing, with a scavenger list I didn’t use. What emerged was a particular aperture for seeing.

…a giant stone cat on a porch, noticed only as a corner is rounded.

…a tree with a narrow vertical gap where it seemed the trunk has split and fused again, leaving a sliver of an opening you can see into.

…another tree with a gap, but the splitting of the trunk happened low to the ground, after which there are a number of thick rising branches and a deep vertical hole in the middle that you can see through, like a window.

…light lilac-blue flowers on a building-high shrub, flowers you can only see from a certain angle, flowers I spotted weeks ago and didn’t find again for many days.

…a stone rabbit in a large pot of weeds.

…a statue of a frog on a fountain that only appears in the moment you pass it and always looks like a headless figure before it resolves into a frog.

…a tree full of yellow roses, two light purple ones tucked in, idiosyncratic.

…a large green tree full of green limes, indistinguishable in color from the leaves, only visible when you take in the lines.

4.
The title of a file one night this week has a key searchable word, doubt. I tucked more specific and telling labels inside as I grappled with unexpected freefall. I was aware when the cliff gave way. I had been tentatively building a bridge, one made of glass, one that sways, one that can change size and shape and perspective, one that can be a ladder as easily as a walkway.

Glass recurs as an unexpected material and metaphor. A greenhouse with a multi-colored roof has become a touchstone, but there have been many alcoves where glass containers, orbs, windows, mirrors, and lenses hold, carry, and invite meaning. Somewhere along the way, I began not only weaving thread but casting glass, inverting a process and rejecting a story I’ve always told myself about my writing. I’ve been crossing bridges, wandering ruins, and walking in a forest that unfolds only as I move forward with each step.

This week I’ve been caught in a tailspin of doubt with roots in visualization, imagination, memory, and the differences between a well and a shallow pool, between surface-level semantics and something more expansive. I’ve stood at the edge studying voids, the fear of the chasm, and the worry that there is only the thinnest surface reflection and that I am unable, really, to follow deeper.

Maybe I was right all along.
My whispered fear destabilized the ground.

The clear thought that I am always telling half-stories added to the swirling vortex, and I continued to descend. The ground continued to crumble. The dangling bridge shattered. The doors disappeared.

What does it mean if there are only half-stories? What does it mean when something hybrid emerges, a new path, and then the ground crumbles, thins, or shrinks? What does it mean when failure of imagination and memory control the board and the shifting terrain? What does it mean when they fuse?

What does it mean to stand to the side and talk about the half-story, tell the quarter-story, or the eighth, the sliver of detail that hints at a story that itself is only a fragment of a story?

What happens if stories are always just a small peek into the View-Master, the snow globe, the faded photo, always just a blurred image that will never resolve? What if all half-stories are really the same stories, hovering in the same field, walking the same circle?

I keep reminding myself that echoes are not replicas, and half-stories may be partial or incomplete, but they are not the same as half-truths.

I am still caught with a metaphor of a shallow pool.

This, too, is a half-story.

Illustrated Journal

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

There were a number of odd stumbles into past files as I worked on today’s post. Things cycle in ways that are disconcerting and in ways that hint both at what is going on and at what it means to be a writer over decades. There are echoes, and sometimes they are uncanny, ironic, haunting, and ghostly as they drift into view with timestamps and dates that show not only that things recur but that there may also be a period to the orbit.

• 2025: Pink Shirts in the Garden; an Apple and a Pear (this poem)

• 2025: Tawny Yellow Nets (this poem; recursion, but early)

• 2024: A Little Golden Book and Yellow Roses

• 2024: Send the Invitation; Take the Chance

• 2023: The quiet power of limiting

• 2023: Review of Look Again by Elizabeth Trembley (graphic novel)

Fun Finds

Goblins: This reel at Instagram is a total delight. (For those doing Illustrate Your Week, this is the “why” of the goblin prompt.)

Diary Comics: My interest in graphic novels and personal (or diary) comics is part of what led me to find my own way with illustrated journaling many years ago. If only I could visualize and draw from my head more easily. If you, too, are interested in this comic form, check this great post from K. Woodman-Maynard: What Diary Comics Are (and Why I Love Them).

(I do use reference photos, but my lack of visualization is a huge roadblock. It makes me endlessly sad that I can’t just draw from my head.)

For anyone wanting a self-paced refresh or a toe-in-the-water with comics, our read-along notes from Lynda Barry’s Making Comics are here.

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 20 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish.

This week, you might start here:

• Name something you noticed recently that surprised you

• What color comes to mind in this moment

• Two rhyming words

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 20 (2026) — May 10-16

Week 20 for 2026!

Many of the prompts this week lean heavily into the calendar. Others are grounded, as they should be, in your week. I rethought (and removed) the one that was most obtuse. (You’re welcome.) The goblins, on the other hand, were irresistible because of a video I saw at Instagram this week. I’ll link it in the Sunday post.

As for the pattern… go with your gut. I’m enjoying a particular kind of pattern, and I found an example I wanted to step into this week, but I didn’t have a good name for it. Radiating swirls defines a broad range of patterns, which all look different. If you have a soft spot for the squiggles on a Hostess cupcake, that’s a valid pattern, too.

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: I Started to Write ⭐ Illustrate Your Week and More ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 I Started to Write

Today is a little bit of a clearinghouse post. This is me picking up a pile of softly colored sticks and tossing them in the air, a game, a puzzle, and a reminder that everything is surface. These are not vignettes because, though I am offering juxtaposition, I am giving you no details. There is little here to hold, but there is something soothing in this kind of unfolding list. Maybe you’ll find a shape in the contours, an animal in the clouds, or the echo of a song you almost know. You are not asked to make meaning or find a mirror. The rules are simple: Just find one stick to safely remove.

I started to write about how the trees disappeared one morning this week, a momentary disruption of frame that made me question the edges.

I started to write about goldfish and wearing too-big clothes that make me forget I’ve grown out of other clothes that were once too big.

I started to write about the ducks that spilled off the boat, almost thirty thousand bath toys, and how scientists used them to visualize the movement of water.

I started to write about the books piled on the table, on the bench, on the shelves, in stacks and boxes by the door.

I started to write about the pink house
and the stairs
and the key
and the tern.

I started to write about how people don’t really want answers.

I started to write about the process of wandering,
of letting go and finding new footing.

I started to write about the folding table and how I sit with my back to the window.
I started to write, but I couldn’t find a pen.

I started to write about a tarot deck that tells the story of a lost rubber duck.

I started to write about the juncos in the dark of early morning after a sleepless night, a veil of noise that rose like insects at dusk.

I started to write that I haven’t started to write at all.
I started to write about things I miss.
I started to write about a most simple desire.

I started to write about a weather vane that looks like a whale from one direction and a wolf from another.

I started to write, but the nibs all feel dry even though the pens are full of ink.

I started to write about clearing the things off the mirror hooks months ago as an experiment.

I started to write about a homemade cow doll in a rusty red dress, straddling a pink and white striped beanie, on top of the painted birdhouse cabinet, and how I want to throw it away.

I started to write about how the idea of drawing all the things to get rid of was a terrible trap, and I halfway blame Kate Bingaman-Burt.1

I started to write that I started drawing things to get rid of last fall, and since then, I’ve gotten rid of nothing.

I started to write about disenchantment with a long project, something I grappled with a few months ago, but I think I’m over it, and I tend to write from within, not through a rearview mirror.

Except the piece I have sitting to the side on Medusa. That one requires a mirror.

I started to write that I really hate sentence fragments, and it is rare that I let one stand.

I started to write about things I can’t write about publicly and how lonely that has become.

I started to write about a sudden attachment to a bagel, chips, and chickpeas for dinner.

I started to write about the few things I miss about having a stove.

I started to write about a new tarot spread I created and how the two decks I am using speak to one another.

I started to write about a table set for twelve and what I saw in a small mirror.

I started to redact a previous statement about mirrors.

I started to write about days when capturing morning light becomes a study of the depth of trees.

I started to write about phenomenology, and, no, that has nothing to do with the bumps on the head.

I started to write about things that seem random and yet not random at all.

I started to write about the ways in which things that seem random can open side doors and reveal alcoves.

I started to write about how sometimes you close your eyes and there are swirling pools of color, and sometimes there are none.

I started to write about how I stay quiet now in certain conversations because I now understand I can’t go there.

I started to write about the texture of the sky tonight.

I started to write about what it means to enter the twenty-fourth month.

I started to write about the story I heard about a trip to the museum with someone who stopped to take mushrooms before entering the Monet exhibit.

I started to write about the things waiting to be written, doors I am afraid I may not know how to reenter.

I started to write about other doors, like the one that appeared in a field of wild mustard.

I started to write, but I didn’t.

Illustrate Your Week and More

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: 13 Reasons to Keep an Illustrated Journal

• 2024: Body Doubling and a Writing Community

• 2023: Simply Sunday - Abecedary (Even older.)

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 19 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

Last week my post was late, for a variety of reasons and no reason at all. There are things I am exploring, things I am questioning, and things I am circling, duct tape in one hand and something sharp in the other. Sometimes, I carry only dice. There are things in the way, things standing between me and the words. The mountain has teeth.

I appreciate those of you who noticed the missing post and those of you who reached out when I wasn’t in my expected spot on my expected day. I appreciate those of you who still found the post later, read, and commented.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 19 (2026) — May 3-9

Week 19 for 2026! A bit of time each day adds up. Keep in mind that it doesn’t matter how “finished” your pages are. You can ink or fill them in, or you can leave them in pencil, or they can hover somewhere in between. It’s okay! There are no extra awards for completion. But a few minutes a day records more than you would otherwise, and those details accumulate on your pages.

The calendar this week is a hodgepodge. You might find something there that specifically catches your interest beyond the prompts. I have fond memories of drawing alphabet magnets in another year for this week.

For the “cartoonist” prompt, you can take that any direction… something in the style of a favorite, a character from a favorite comic, a practice-copy of a panel from a favorite (to see how they make everything fit), a portrait, or just listing a title or a name. If you are not interested in comics, skip it!

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: The Heron at the Top of the Tree ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 The Heron at the Top of the Tree

This week, there was a phantom bird, one heard and not seen. I am listening, hoping it wasn’t just passing through, hoping I will hear it again, this bird that would be unusual here.

I wrote in my journal one night something about being too old to be so undervalued, a seed of awareness that had taken root. Filling in the block lettering released the words and gave them external shape. The illustrated journal holds meaning in a distilled form, truth encoded and compressed. Even I may or may not understand later, may or may not remember the way the weeds grew.

Some people build <choose a word from below> on toothpick structures and woven systems, and some build on smoke and mirrors.

Stories. Identities. Histories.
Words are so often interchangeable.

This week is about none of these things.

This week, I saw a heron standing on a small branch at the top of a very tall tree. In the photo, the heron looks like something someone might have added, a bit of collage, an illogical bird glued to a tree.

I am gathering threads.
Maybe someday I will spin yarn.
Maybe I will braid rope.
I won’t remember what the threads mean,
but it will be pretty rope.

This week, I woke from a dream that offset my morning light project because everything was cracking, ceilings and floors, cracks following invisible channels, spidering, and branching. I caused the collapse because I saw a small toy that had been left on, yellow and plastic, something like an old Gameboy, and I flipped the switch off. I rarely remember dreams, so I made a note before rising. Already, the thread is gone.

This week, we debated whether it was worth it to go to the theater to see a movie. Deciding on pizza at home and some other space movie, I tried to convince them to watch one I saw years ago in New York, a stray memory that flared when I saw the name of the movie on a list.

What I remember: a single frozen impression, just a smudge, me and two others in the dark outside before going in. My brain says outdoor ticket kiosk, but I don’t know. I had forgotten we saw the movie there, and I remember nothing else, including the movie. It’s possible I am wrong entirely. I mused aloud that it must have been this or that year, but in checking the release date, I was two or three years off. It is disorienting to not be able to make the timeline fit.

Every flash is a potential clue.
But smudges can only be glimpsed from far away.
They dissolve, not clarify, when approached.
They cannot be sharpened.

These are lost years.
All years are lost.
The emptiness is more frozen tundra than impressionism, but there was warmth in the flare, in the individual detail.
That happened.

The collage cards from December were lost for weeks, found,
and are now in a pile. They seem to still need finishing touches.
The farther I move from a story, an event, a project, a drawing,
the more distant it becomes.

This week is about too many things, and yet I found myself accepting that nothing would fall apart if I didn’t show up. So, I lost games of chess and cribbage. I talked about dice mechanics. I debated movies to watch.

I listened to what was and wasn’t said.

I froze when I heard a crash outside, someone’s parked car being hit.
I braced when the house shook, and then shook again, earthquakes just a few miles away.

This week, I had a moment of clarity while standing in a fleece jacket in front of the window recording morning light. The insight started there, with the size of the fleece jacket, not the window. It kept shifting as I followed the initial thought, leapfrogging through related philosophy, moving up and down a telescoping lens on perspective, proximity, and the size of the field, the box, or the frame of view.

I branched to other philosophies, ideas about the past that seem nonsensical at the cosmic level, but that overlay differently when reduced to the individual and to certain relationships with memory.

I am not afraid to borrow elements to paste in place as I map memory, meaning, and identity, herons on stilted legs balancing on thin branches.

I am skipping between lily pads, trying to pin meaning in place,
but I keep running into a monolithic mountain of truth that was always there, unnamed.
It monopolizes the map.
I wonder how I managed to avoid it,
when I was always writing about it.

I guess I was living blue, not seeing blue.

Now that I am both living and seeing blue, I am running into the mountain again and again. I am simultaneously chipping away at it from the outside and tunneling from within as I continue to observe, catalog, and sort through layers of sediment.

I am walking broad circles around it, marking my path, leaving notes tied to trees, buttons on shelves. In the dark, I hear echoes and see, as if from a perch high above, practices, viewfinders, and lenses I have built, smoothed, lived in, and written with for decades.

I am charting the topography. The patterns form a partial tessellation of undulating and broken lines, dots, and dashes to rival any message from the sea. There are voids, chasms of darkness with little flickers I thought could be expanded, illuminated, if I wandered deliberately, lantern in hand.

I was wrong.

We watch a movie I won’t remember later.
We watch another, an adaptation of a book I must have read, but a story I don’t seem to know.

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: Castles in the Sky and Blueberry Muffins

• 2024: Just One Cup

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 18 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

Thank you to those who commented last week. Some of you are here for illustrated journal posts. Some of you are here for personal essays. I appreciate those of you following along.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish. You can easily join in with:

• Mr. Potato Head Day is on the calendar this week. What is the first piece you add?

• The color you find most comforting?

• The adjective closest to the top when you think about your day?

Poem In Your Pocket Day is also this week, which brought this and this to mind.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 18 (2026) — Apr 26-May 2

Week 18 for 2026!

It’s the last week of April, and the calendar is full of ideas for your journal, from retro pop culture to animals, birds, and ancient traditions.

I left some of the fun ones out because they’ve been in the prompt set year after year, but you’ll spot the ones you care about in the calendar list. Others, I’ve hinted at with doors that you can open in any directions. Several of the prompts this week tuck more than one possible allusion into the fold. Have fun!

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: A Stack of Boxes and Buttons ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌A Stack of Boxes and Buttons

Dear LMNOP,

Did the last message reach you? I will pretend, of course, that these letters get sent. Sitting to write almost assumes they will be folded, sealed, carried, and dropped in a small box in a tree for you to find.

I pulled the hermit card today. It was just one among many, but it came brimming with irony in a slot related to connection. It’s a beautiful card, a raven with a lantern in a tree on a gold-lit evening in the snow. It is always a welcome card, but maybe I should be less unequivocal.

An expression I hear people say again and again these days: I’m not mad about it.

Such an odd phrase. Nonchalant. A bit blasé. Almost non-committal. The slight detachment and understatement of a litotes.

Today, I sewed a handful of buttons onto a pillow. I don’t think I have told you about this pillow or the boxes. Time has folded and inverted so many times now that I am not sure. It will be only the smallest number of days before I forget. Already, the edges have started to fade. I can’t put myself back in the moment of finding. Even the pillow will hold only the fact of the buttons, not the thread of the unknown.

I hope you have a cup of tea. Blueberry? Cherry? Remind me to tell you about the cherry jam.

So, this pillow...
Earlier, I absently ran my finger over one of the buttons, smooth and flat, its opalescent surface shimmering with soft color in the light of the small lamp. I often gravitate to that one with its slight indentation, a small well where my finger naturally circles.

I’ve sewn a hundred or more buttons onto the pillow. They sit close to one another, but deliberately spaced, a small margin around each. They move beneath the hand, each wavering on the column of thread holding it in place, stitches carefully sewn through the holes, sewn and resewn, reinforced against time. Moving my hand across the buttons, I imagine a field of weeds in wind, but there is no rustle. On the surface, the buttons make no noise, but within, they carry an echo.

The fourth one on the second row looks like ivory. It has a small chip on the edge and somehow carries the suggestion of watching for whales. On the seventh row, there is one that brings sunset, the pink and orange of roses on the table. There is another, a few rows down, that holds twilight. There are buttons that feel organic, as if they were pulled directly from the wall of a cave or a beach at low tide. Some have slightly raised edges. Some are smooth. Others are dimpled or pitted or hammered. Some are reflective, some opaque, and others translucent. There is one that is a deep green velvet, a large disc, rounded on top. It brings Avalon to mind.

Another collection? You might be thinking that. In some ways, yes. But these buttons are not sentimental objects retained through the years.

They are a bit of a mystery.

When I found the box up high on the shelf in the closet, I had no idea what it was. When I pulled it down, it seemed to be an ordinary cardboard box, almost weightless. There were no hastily scrawled words on the side indicating the contents. It was a typical box except for the unusual closure, flaps at the top that met in the middle and were held closed with a button and loop.

The button was large and round, a swirling silver-gray mother of pearl.

That was the first button.

I lifted the elastic over the button and opened the box. Inside, there was another box. It too, had a button closure, and tucked just underneath the elastic was a rectangular slip of paper with a single word written in small letters: hold.

The color of bone, the button looked like stone. Even in the small space of the disc, the subtle striations were captivating, a visible sign of the compression of time.

Puzzled, I reached in and lifted the box out of the box. It, too, felt as if it contained nothing. I removed the slip of paper and unlatched the loop. Opening the flaps revealed another box, another button, and another slip of paper with a single word: star.

It is hard to remember the way the air grew heavy and time went still as I lifted out the next box and then the next. Each box felt as if it weighed nothing, but every box contained another.

I opened a dozen boxes that day.

When I reached the end, a small box with a button on top and no flaps, I sat on the floor, confused, and yet curious, surrounded by empty boxes. I made a small pile of the slips of paper, knowing they might be rearranged to make a sentence, but I kept returning to the buttons, which seemed to be both the key and the answer.

I don’t remember how many days or weeks passed before I was in that closet again and looked up to find another cardboard box. Feeling time begin to fold, I pulled the box down from the shelf. It had a dusty lavender square button with gently rippling edges, and when I opened it, inside was another box with another button and a slip of paper that read flicker.

One by one I opened the boxes, each with a button and a slip of paper, always a single word.

Another dozen boxes.

I considered the buttons for weeks that turned into months, the pile in the dish growing by twelves. Most are flat, circles and squares, almost oddly uniform in size. Many are neutral, creams, grays, and pale purples. There is an indigo circle with the impression of stars. There is an assortment of Celtic knots. One button has a verdigris patina that feels ancient. Another is abalone shell, deep and mysterious. There is a midnight raven.

No matter how much I studied the buttons, I couldn’t sort out why this is happening. The boxes appear at random. But there are always twelve, and every button is different.

As the count grew, sewing them to a pillow made sense, a way to keep them together and visible. I’ve sewn them carefully, reinforcing the stitches, locking them in place while making sure they are still free to move.

I continue to hear echoes when I look at them, smell the salt in the air, see pool chairs on the lawn, horses on a beach, a purple bear, a winding road through tall trees.

So many things have become strange. There is a growing willingness to sit with things that cannot be explained.

When I see you next, you can see what you think of them. I am curious if you will hear their echoes.

Am I mad? Of course not. Am I mad about it?
No. I am intrigued.
I am grateful for the unknowing.
I am curious about the echoes.
I am comforted by the feel of them under my fingers.
I even appreciate the task of sewing them in place.

It seems so long since we have talked.
Tell me how you are?

A.

P.S.—I noticed tonight that the overshirt I often sleep in, soft and worn with time, one I don’t think was mine to begin with, is missing a button.1

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: The Good Cookies

• 2024: 100+ Lists for Your Illustrated Journal

• The I Am Always Writing a Letter series

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 17 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

Once again, today asks you to sit with something strange, something largely unexplained. The questions that might seem obvious are not the ones answered.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish. You can easily join in with:

• The color of a button near you.

• The word willing or unwilling, whichever feels right.

• A childhood nursery rhyme that sometimes comes to mind.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 17 (2026) — Apr 19-25

Week 17 for 2026!

Last week, I gave some additional notes about the prompt set and the week, and some of you may have appreciated that. I think of prompts, often, as a puzzle, and sometimes a puzzle isn’t really what you want or need. I will say that puzzles give you the opportunity to find your own way in, your own response or thread. But, if they feel too opaque, this may help. This week:

• There is a penguin day on the calendar. That may feed into those w-words, but you might find that those words lead you somewhere very different, and that’s okay.

• The “diagram” one is a nudge to visually connect three things that are on your page… after the fact.

• One of the hardest prompts that I include in the weekly prompt sets is “things that made you smile” (or laugh, some weeks). Be on the lookout for them. Record them. If you can, challenge yourself to draw something from the moment or even add a comic panel. Those five things? They are concrete things from the week and help anchor the week as different from others, even if things feel similar week to week.

• Trying to relax… you can take that all kinds of directions. There is a laughable calendar connection, but it may be simply that… a nod of the head. What are you doing these days to relax?

• An unusual tree? Do you pass an odd tree or have an odd tree? Or maybe you have an odd tree in your head? Or maybe you have favorite science fiction or fantasy worlds, and a tree or type of tree comes to mind.

Some weeks, it feels like I look at the prompts later, during the week when I am tired, and my responses all feel word-driven or cerebral since I don’t draw from my head. I’m okay with that, and I respond to many prompts in words, but some nights, what I really want is something small to draw that I don’t have to solve or sort out. This week, here’s an extra prompt that is specifically a “to draw” nudge (but didn’t end up fitting in the space of the prompt image):

• Something sticking out of a jar/pencil holder

(Even if you’ve drawn it before, that’s okay. Thinking that you can’t draw something more than once is something you have to continue to set aside.)

There are actually quite a few other things on the calendar that might inspire you this week. The prompts are not simply mirrors of the calendar, so pick and choose as you fill in your pages.

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: Using Squares in Your Journal ⭐ Fragment from the Week ⭐ By-the-Numbers Update(s) ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 Using Squares in Your Journal

Last week I wrote about using circles in your illustrated journal pages, and I shared examples from assorted journals over a handful of years. I mentioned that I initially landed in the illustrated journal format I use partly because of squares.

That’s not an understatement.

As I prepared to document a milestone year, I combined my interest in graphic novels, drawing, journaling, and sketchnoting in one visual record.

I already had a deep love of grids and modular approaches to layout.
Circles... came later.

Today, I use circles and squares interchangeably, sometimes in juxtaposition and sometimes not, but squares remain a core foundation.

Underneath most pages, the bones are invisible grids, columns and rows of containers that hold and subtly organize information from a span of days.

A note on terminology: While it is true that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares, I am using the word squares to encompass both squares and rectangles. So when I talk about using squares on my pages, it might mean either. Semantically, and mathematically, this isn’t technically correct. I know that, and it’s okay. I also refer to both shapes as boxes.

Not surprisingly, flipping through the same pile of old journals (as last week) turned up a variety of squares. I found lots of small comics. I found drawings and portraits in squares. I found recipes and notes, headlines, statistics, and quotes. I found actors, political characters, book covers, flowers, icon practice, and more.

With an aesthetic that hinges on filling as much space as possible, an approach that enables the juxtaposition of multiple blocks of text and illustration without loss of visual clarity is important.

Squares do that.

Squares do work differently than circles. They have a different feel. They have corners. They don’t have the same fluidity, and yet they fill space more cleanly. Squares immediately establish composition. You can fill a page with squares and rectangles in varying sizes, and the underlying grid will snap into place.

Underneath most pages, the bones are invisible grids, columns and rows of containers that hold and subtly organize the jumble of information from a span of days.

Ten Ways to Use Squares in an Illustrated Journal

Here are ten simple ways to use squares on your illustrated journal pages as containers and modular layout elements.1

1. Use squares to hold daily notes: Squares offer contained spaces that help keep blocks of text visually separate from each other, even when they are in close proximity.

2. Use squares as bordered containers for drawings: You can draw anything inside of a square, but don’t limit yourself to drawings that fit neatly or fully. When used as a viewfinder or thumbnail, the boundary of a square becomes a window through which you see whatever part of the drawing fits in the opening. This invites a more zoomed-in drawing of part of the subject rather than the whole.

3. Use squares for comic panels: Using squares as panels to record small stories or exchanges is a great way to add visual narrative to your journal. Try adding simple three-panel comics to start.

4. Use squares to track personal data: Add small grid-based habit trackers to your pages to integrate bullet journal-style tracking.

5. Use squares to record most-used apps: Recording app icons is an easy visual way to capture your current go-to apps. You might be surprised to see how these change throughout the year.

6. Use squares for mindfulness: For slowing down and mindful mark marking, squares can be filled with hatching, stippling, patterns, tangles, and more. Try a column or row of small squares as a way to experiment.

7. Use squares for recording palettes: Squares work well for capturing palettes, documenting new tools, exploring mixtures, recording favorites, and tracking currently inked fountain pens.

8. Use squares for small drawings: Squares offer a contained space for visual vocabulary and icon practice. Lining up a row or column of squares invites you to add small illustrations with intention.

9. Use squares for multiple thumbnails: Squares are classic for quickly sketching thumbnail drawings of scenes. This same technique applies to drawings of the same subject from multiple angles, each in its own square.

10. Use squares for call-out text: Squares are great for quotes, definitions, and headlines.

While I move back and forth between shapes, when I have periods of doubt or resistance with my journal, I almost always sketch in a few empty boxes at the start of the week. I begin most weeks with a portrait, but after that, I place boxes around the perimeter to give myself scaffolding and target containers to fill. I don’t always use these boxes, but it can be helpful to lay the groundwork for filling in the week so that a few containers are available when you sit down with your journal.

Sometimes, simply making it easy to fill space increases the chances that you will fill space.

As for rulers? I don’t use them. My journal remains a freeform and fluid space. I only use a ruler when working on a standalone project that requires more precision in the grid. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use a ruler. It is just a reminder that you don’t have to.

All illustrated journal spreads are excerpted from personal illustrated journals between 2019 and 2026. © A. Cowen

🔮Fragment from the Week

By-the-Numbers Update(s)

For my own self-accountability:

• I am still tracking morning light. I am in the fifth month now of morning light swatches. (Previously, I only did this for two months.) In continuing, I have missed a few days here and there. I am now sorting out ways for the project to hold the reality of the shifting timing of morning light, earlier and earlier as we approach the summer solstice. My awareness of the progression of light over the course of a year is already much different than what I thought I understood having only done this in the fall months.

• I am still on track with my 100-day project of diary comic affirmations. I haven’t been posting them daily, but we are now at the midway point. Projects in silence and without visible accountability do risk drifting in the long middle. Fitting things in is a challenge right now, but I’ve relaxed into the approach I have this year, and I am hoping the second half goes easily. Overall, this year does feel very different than when I did diary comic affirmations in 2024.

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: Drawing Comics - What’s holding you back? (Almost uncanny that this is the year-over-year match. There are a bunch of images in that post… an earlier me. There is also a foreshadowing of the way Eliot played into my 100-day series last year.)

• 2024: 12 Ways to Keep Your Journal Private

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 16 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish. You can easily join in with:

• An adjective for how you feel?

• An adjective for what you see when you look out the window?

• An adjective for what you see when you close your eyes?

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 16 (2026) — Apr 12-18

Week 16 for 2026!

I like to keep things open-ended, but in case you look at these and worry you don’t have a way in:

• If you don’t play a game that has high-scoring words, then branch off to any word game or any favorite “big” word.

• I was tempted to add “in the living room” or “from the shelf” to the contours. You might find it a good challenge to narrow your focus to an area… and do a few from the same space or a few of the same item from different angles. (Try putting them in boxes for easy organization. See this week’s post on using squares; out later today for extra inspiration.)

• There is a connection on the calendar for “Your story isn’t over.” But you can easily take it a different direction. Try a 1-3-sentence summary of where you have been, where you are headed, or who you are.

• D.E.A.R. Day didn’t make the list, but including what you are reading (by title, quote, or cover) is always a good idea.

• The “wild side” prompt has an obvious connection, but don’t be afraid to mix things up. Animal crackers anyone?’

• Anime selfie? Okay, that’s not going to be for everyone. But, really, I would love anime hair. What color would you choose?

Have fun.

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: Using Circles in Your Journal ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 Using Circles in Your Journal

I went traipsing through the years looking for circles, and I found them at every turn, big circles and small circles, half circles and whole circles, split circles and pink suns, wandering doodles, background patterns, ink swatches, and mindful hatching that brought balance. I found portraits in circles and drawings of robots and toy cars and hands. I found mood tracking, random quotes, countless individual words, and lots and lots of daily notes tucked into the curving form of a circle. I found circles that folded in upon themselves, circles that had outlines, and circles that were just suggestions. I found circles that were orderly and stacked and circles that were scattered.

I thought about circles, and I remembered the scratch of the dip pen for a 100-day project that used circles. I remembered doing the ink-a-day project in multiple years. I remembered my original drawing group and the person who often used circles. I remembered nights when I would draw a column of circles and sit and fill them in, appreciating the focus of making intentional lines and putting ink on the page, the comfort of filling space. I thought about polka dots and concentric circles. I thought about spirals and mazes and labyrinths, about paths on the page that branch in multiple directions because the circle is an origin line and yet doesn’t have to be a locked container. I thought about the fact that a circle can be a permeable perimeter.

I thought about the fact that I started my illustrated journal because I loved squares.

I still love squares and grids, but today I am going to talk about circles, their softer edges, their feeling of flow, and their ability to bring cohesion without sharp lines.

Thirteen Ways to Use Circles in an Illustrated Journal

Here are thirteen simple ways to use circles on your illustrated journal pages as containers and modular layout elements.

1. Use circles to hold daily notes: Circles offer contained spaces that immediately turn ordinary notes into visual elements. Let the size of the circle guide the size of the text.

2. Use circles as bordered containers for drawings: You can draw anything inside of a circle, but don’t limit yourself to drawings that fit neatly or fully. Let the edge of the circle become a window through which you see whatever part of the drawing fits the opening.

3. Use circles to track personal data: A number of circles can be an effective way to rate days, moods, and energy levels.

4. Use circles for recording palettes: Small circles work well for swatching new tools, exploring mixtures, noting current favorites, and documenting colors used on a page.

5. Use repeated circles for small drawings: Circles offer a contained space for visual vocabulary and icon practice. Lining up a row or column of circles invites you to add small illustrations with intention.

6. Use circles for call-out text: Circles are great for quotes, definitions, and headlines. These elements can work freeform, but they also can be effectively lettered into circles.

7. Use circles as containers for single words: Small circles are effective when following prompts that ask for individual words. Let the shape play a role in how the word is lettered to fill the space.

8. Use circles to record data: Circles work well for tracking information like temperature, sleep cycles, changing prices, sunset, and more. Circles can be filled with numbers, symbols, or systems of color.

9. Use circles for mindfulness: Circles can be filled with repeated marks, patterns, or doodles. Circles can also be the edge around which freeform drawings take shape.

10. Use circles as initial containers: You can begin a drawing in a circle and decide later to continue the drawing beyond the perimeter. The drawing will often still hold the subtle echo of the circle.

11. Use circles as implied containers: Once you’ve filled a circle with text or a drawing, it will hold its shape. The eye will register a circle or partial circle even if there is no outline.

12. Use circles to fill odd space: You can use whole or partial circles to create containers that echo and connect elements on the page.

13. Use circles to create negative space: A circle that ends up unfilled becomes its own visual element as other content fills in around it.

Modular Elements for Composition

For some people, when they think about approaching the blank page in an illustrated journal, the idea of knowing where things will go can be a stumbling block. If a spread is going to unfold over multiple days, it can seem difficult to know where to start because you don’t necessarily know what other things will rise in the week asking to be included.

Circles and squares both offer modular containers for illustrated journal content. They allow you to work within the border or outside of it. Using shaped containers may sound like a precision move, but it doesn’t need to be. Pages can be unstructured and freeform and still make good use of containers that create subtle divisions and allow some text to sit next to other text while remaining separate. In a journal that involves both illustration and text, containers are a compositional tool that helps hold pages together and helps make the content of a page visually coherent and accessible.

I often start my week by penciling in a few containers that can hold content. I don’t have to know what they will hold. It isn’t a plan. The containers don't lock anything in place. I don't have to use them. But they sit as an invitation.

How to Make Circles?

Circles do not need to be perfect circles to behave as functional layout containers. You can freehand them, but a simple template with multiple sizes of circles can be convenient and offers a lot of flexibility. Depending on the size you need, plastic container lids (from the kitchen cabinet) work well for larger circles. For smaller circles, I used to use a plastic ring-sizing template I salvaged from a high school information packet. Keep your eyes open. If it’s round, and the edge is smooth, it may be just the right size at some point for adding circles to your pages.

If you decide you want a readymade template, make sure you look carefully at the product information. Many templates contain small circles. Make sure you find one that has a large enough circle to work well for your sketchbook/journal size and the size at which you typically draw. I enjoy circles in the one-inch range for mindful mark making, for ink swatching, and for small freeform doodling, but I work in an A4 journal, and I need larger circles when I am using them as containers for drawings and text. The template I use has a 3.5-inch circle as the largest size. (It is hard to find a template with a larger one.)

Some template examples: 3.5 inch largest circle (flexible plastic; this is the one I have), 3.5 inch largest circle (in the larger template of this multipack), 2.5 inch largest circle (metal template). There are many options with smaller circles.

If knowing where to put things on the page is a stumbling block, a few circles penciled in at the start of the week can help you divide the space into sections that can make the page easier to navigate. Fill the containers. Fill the space around them.

All illustrated journal spreads are excerpted from personal illustrated journals between 2019 and 2026. © A. Cowen

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: A Sunday Roundup and Green Socks

• 2024: Am I a Writer? Am I an Artist?

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 15 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

I had a trio of “mis-knowing” moments this week. One was something misheard (for far too many chapters). One was a sudden realization that an idiom I grew up with typically means something else. One was a moment of mis-seeing. All three were silly, but each carried a reminder that perspective and context matter. Even when well-meaning, sometimes we hear, see, know, and interpret incorrectly.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish. You can easily join in with:

• What are you counting this month?

• Is there something you are knowingly letting slide in your creative life?

• If you could only use one color of ink for the next thirty days, and it could not be black, what color would you choose?

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 15 (2026) — Apr 5-11

Week 15 for 2026! So another week and moving fully into April. I missed the full moon somehow last week, so I recorded that… I missed seeing the full moon, the one called the Pink Moon. Your illustrated journal doesn’t depend on external extremes, journeys, or a constant stream of novelty. Sometimes, the way in is easier, if you let it be.

There are a number of calendar events this week, so many that I weeded a bunch out and really debated about which ones to allude to in prompts. When viewed through the lens of the calendar list, some of these can be fun, and yet they are also open to interpretation. I tried to set these up in a way that will allow you to work into a range of different events and calendar dates, if you want to, but they do not constrain you to that.

Personally I prefer things that allow me to find my own door.

The one funny note here is that I initially was going to list safety pins as a pattern and was thinking about linking and chaining them as a meandering string. Out of curiosity, I did a quick search to see what kinds of safety pin pattern images I might find and instead hit friendship safety pins made of beads and more complex ones that involve multiple safety pins and create images. It was a rabbit hole that had nothing to do with what I was actually looking for.

The Try line is new, an alternative to patterns and icons. The circle inclusion relates specifically to this week's main post (which will be out later today). I have used safety pins as icon practice before, and you are welcome to do that instead. But, I think they offer some interesting potential as a structural element.

With those W words, go beyond the ones that are already in the prompt set. What are your W words? Letter them. Illustrate them. Add a small icon. Tell a story. Write a poem. Make a tongue twister. There are so many ways you can use even a simple prompt like that. Have fun.

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: On Cairns and Hidden Drawers ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 On Cairns and Hidden Drawers

Dear LMNOP,

I have been wandering more out of sight than in recently, more and more lost, exhausted by even the idea of mapping. There is worry when the thread that has been the lifeline loses shape.

I thought of you recently.

I was moving a book I’ve been reading on drawers and cabinets and hidden spaces, when a folded piece of paper fell out. It was yet another letter I had started, another attempt to make sense of time and distance, to stack words in a way that might reach you, another letter never sent.

Will this one find you?

It is to the writing that I return, to the idea that words can braid and twist, that a lexicon of ivy, irrepressible, can hold things together without simultaneously pulling them down.

Unfolding the unfinished letter, I laughed at the fact that it, too, began with something found, something that called you to mind.

...I stumbled over a scrap of paper this week while working on shaping giant vaults of information, scaffolding I am not sure I will use but that is soothing in the tedium of building. The scrap is written in my hand, and yet I have no memory of writing it. When I first found the words, I read them a few times, knowing the fragment is mine, understanding the context, just not remembering the moment, and I thought of you.

I thought of how long it has been since I wrote, knowing you won’t reply.

The fragment is odd, nonsensical. It rises from a liminal space where simple words become a puzzle, something to turn in the light.

With a small pocket full of stones, time-worn, veins the
color of bone forming sigils on their surface, I walked
silently to each door and tossed a single stone through the
opening. One by one, each door returned a stone,
weightless, the sigil wiped clean, the hum of memory,
shadow, and self gone. The last door,
the door at the end of the hall, returned a cairn,
the sigils from each stone in the pile shimmering as
the threads connecting them hovered in the air.
One by one, I pulled each door shut and left.

Cairns are markers. When it comes to trail logic, they indicate direction. But cairns are also symbols of balance, less about physics than metaphor, stacks that stand while others collapse.

There is comfort in forgotten, unmapped spaces, in sifting and cataloguing what remains after erosion, and in charting constellations that bring meaning to the dark. This is familiar terrain, but something has fractured the way I understand what I remember, what I know, and how I write. I thought I could gather, reassemble, stack, and shape the past into narrative, but it may be, in fact, that I simply have a pile of stones and an ever-widening blankness.

Recently, I envisioned a room of glass boxes in many colors and sizes, boxes from different points in life, boxes that held memory and regret, softness, grief, loneliness, pleasure, and more. There was an unspoken invitation to stack them, the fragility of glass in the air.

What does it mean, you might ask, speaking of the fragment, of the image of the doorways, the stones, the sigils, and the cairn.

I’ve turned it over and over in my mind, pondering the dream logic. I wrote a companion note at the time, a distillation even more opaque, words squeezed and compressed, folded smaller and smaller in form, quite the opposite of a letter in which words unfold again and again, spiraling to a silent choreography in the reading itself.

The companion note floats alongside the longer one, a wisp of echo, something that might be tucked into a fortune cookie, a confusing missive for someone who wanted, really, to know they were going to receive exciting news.

Something else happened recently that I think you will appreciate.

While getting dressed, I reached for a drawer and noticed the glint of a small bronze circular ring pull, two drawers from the bottom, a pull that, though burnished, didn’t match the black knobs. Looking more closely, I saw that the drawer that had been there was now two drawers, one a small sliver, just wide enough for the ring, and another with a regular knob, offset so it lined up with all the others.

Puzzled, I hooked a finger in the bronze ring and pulled. The drawer slid out easily, and inside there was the smallest of packages, something wrapped in a muslin dyed a pale aqua, more green than blue. There was barely enough room for me to slip two fingers into the otherwise empty space to retrieve the package, noticing the thin black velvet ribbon holding the fabric in place. No bow. Just wrapped twice around the middle and tied with a small knot, the ends cut close.

I left the small bundle on the table through the day, looking at it now and then but almost afraid to open it. Later, I picked up the package, barely larger than a postage stamp, slid the ribbon off, and started unwrapping the many layers of fabric.

Inside, there was a gold nib, the low light of the lamp catching its edges and giving it just a bit of extra shine. I knew it was not a typical nib, though I couldn’t tell from looking what might be different. It promised something, and words about a field of stars and a ceiling of glass drifted through my head.

As much as I wanted to slip the nib onto my pen, something in me said, “Not now.”
I rewrapped it, just enough that it wouldn’t get lost, and placed it back in the drawer.

I keep spinning around the realities of time and memory and what happens when those things don’t work the way they should. There is something about naming something that you have always lived with and always articulated and always written through and from and around.

Over and over in the last few weeks, I have recognized how much I miss certain things, things that are hard to give shape, even in a letter. I keep building and rebuilding systems and watching them fall. There is so much rubble, so many stones.

It would be nice to sit and have coffee and a scone, don’t you think?

There was no sound when the edges fell away, just a dimming of light, shadows growing, the floor narrowing, darkness pooling closer and closer to the center where I sat. Aware of the thinning field, I looked for the glow of the smallest of threads, gently pulling them closer, anchoring them under the lantern’s edge. Carefully, I folded a small origami bird, held it close to the remaining light, and with the smallest breath, sent it flying into the darkness, a thread wrapped around its wing.

A

PS: There is no sign of the small drawer now.

Illustrate Your Week, Week 13 of 2026

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: Throwing out the decoder ring

• 2024: A Blinker Speeds Up

• Also on cairns: Making and Moving Piles - A Tower of Hanoi View of Decluttering

• The I Am Always Writing a Letter series

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 14 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish. You can easily join in with:

• A personal-life wish for April

• A treat that would matter enough

Thank you for introducing me to the wonderful Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait gallery, a series of portraits by Robert Shetterly.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 14 (2026) — Mar 29 -Apr 4

Week 14 for 2026! The full moon this week is known as the Pink Moon. It won’t appear pink. The name is a nod to spring, but it feels like one to be aware of. As you close out March and enter the new month, take time to reflect on how things are going and what you are looking ahead to in April. A few minutes a day in your illustrated journal can be a powerful balancing agent when things feel chaotic.

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: The Statue in the Garden ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 The Statue in the Garden

There is a line between knowing and not knowing, and sometimes there is pleasure in standing on the side of unknowing, feet firmly planted in ambiguity, and leaning into uncertainty as the cornerstone of interpretation. There are times when the period of not knowing is, in fact, the story.

I was working from the library one morning last week. Children’s story time was happening outside in the courtyard, noisy and animated. Multiple versions of the itsy bitsy spider in varying sizes drifted through the open windows before someone behind me got up and closed them.

Later, looking out the window after the courtyard had mostly cleared, I watched as a toddler approached a short statue that stood directly between me and him in the little margin of garden. A sippy cup in one hand, he moved unsteadily toward the statue, his free hand outstretched.

When he reached the statue, exactly his height, he touched the side of what I assumed was the face. He stepped back, looking at it intently, and then, seemingly fascinated, touched it again.

After someone took him away by the wrist, I pondered the statue from my side of the window. From where I sat, it looked like a short robed figure. The drape of fabric was clear, but the top portion seemed to be simply a block. I thought the head must be cloaked or hooded. I doubted it was religious, although St. Francis crossed my mind. Maybe it was a druid or a wood nymph. I thought about the terrifying weeping angels from Dr. Who.

I continued to wonder about the statue, and the next day before I sat down at the library to work, I stepped into the courtyard to take a look. Was it a saint, an angel, a druid, or something else?

Expecting to see a face peering from a hood that would make what I had seen from behind make sense, I was confused that the head of the figure seemed to be covered in fabric, a featureless block. As I moved closer, the image reformed in front of me, the scale and shape suddenly making sense. The block of stone was the torso of the figure, the bodice of a garment.

The statue has no head.

Maybe there had been a head at some point. The top of the statue, which I hadn’t been able to see when seated inside, has a roughened indentation that gives the impression that something may have broken off.

The statue with its missing head still carries an aura of mystery, but the narrative intrigue was in the unfolding, in the reframing, in wondering about the square back, pondering what the front might look like, thinking about what kind of statue might be placed in a garden where children wander, remembering the expression on that toddler’s face as he reached out, and, ultimately, recognizing my own misreading of the scene.

🎯 Where I Am

• Being present is not the same as being seen.

• There were echoes which kept me trying to find footing in mist, but mostly the week revealed how quickly internal scaffolding can collapse.

• A slip of the tongue stays with me longer than anything else.

• I really want to know who thought it was a good idea to staple the paper grocery bags at each end before delivery.

• Not knowing how to talk about what I now understand is creating its own distance.

• Distance reinforces distance.

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: Raining Beads

• 2024: Crossing a line

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 13 (2026)

Wow

This is so fantastically and mindbogglingly cool.

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

Hindsight: The photos I took make it seem almost impossible to believe there was ever any ambiguity about the top being the torso, but I observed the statue first from behind. The photo I took a few days later from inside the library has a higher vantage, one that hints at a missing top, but my perspective was straight on the day I watched the toddler approach. Even now, when I let go of what I know, I see it exactly as I saw it then, a short, blocky, hooded figure. I haven’t ventured into the garden itself for a closer look. The photo from just far enough into the courtyard to solve the mystery is the closest I’ve been. I don’t need more information at this point.1

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish.

• Share something you misinterpreted the first time you saw it.

• Share the name of the book you are currently reading.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

1

Historical Note

A garden statue and a toddler that gave me narrative mystery during a mental break from work shouldn’t necessarily have led me to art history. It was an afterthought, or maybe a can’t-sleep moment, a few days later that prompted a quick search and clued me in to yet another angle of possibility.

There is some precedent, especially in Roman art history, for intentionally headless statues. I still think that a headless statue would be an odd choice in a children’s space, so I am leaving this moment filed away as a bit of mystery, a thread of unknowing that gives it story.

Notes:

• I looked around, but I saw no signs of the head.

• Something about the view from behind does make me wonder if there had ever been wings.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 13 (2026) — Mar 22-28

Week 13 for 2026! Welcome to spring. The year continues to tick away. I hope you are finding your journal an inviting space to record footholds from each day.

👉 Calendar connections

Leave a comment

Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

Read more

This week: When the Ground Shifts ⭐ Illustrated Journal ⭐100 Days of Diary Comic Affirmations ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

📌 When the Ground Shifts

1.
This week, the ground shifted beneath my feet and then gave way.
I mapped fault lines, shored up my foundations, and reinforced scaffolding.
This was symbolic
and yet real.

The house continues to make noises that make me worry that the house is falling or the hillside is shifting.
I try to drown them out, ignore them, or sleep through them.
This, too, is real.

Several weeks ago, I fell.
The ground did not move.

Some things that are real are internal.
Some things that are real are rooted in fear of the unknown.
Some things that are real leave scars.

2.
When I went for my annual checkup last year, I noticed the string of intake questions about falling and fear of falling.1 Falling? It wasn’t on my radar.

Until I fell.

I didn’t fall off of anything.
I tripped.
I simply fell while walking.

I was on my first loop around the block of a quiet and very flat neighborhood, when I abruptly landed on the ground, my phone thrown, my palms and knuckles scuffed, and my knee bleeding in multiple places.

It happened so fast.

Stunned and embarrassed, I sat on the sidewalk in the middle of a silent street, wondering who might be watching from behind curtains. I waited a minute to see if there was any real damage and then scooted to retrieve my phone. Once I stood, grateful that nothing seemed broken, I continued walking, carefully, slowly, my knee stinging, my body clearly unhappy about the unexpected impact.

When I got back to where I was parked, I knew that if I sat for the time remaining before I was picking someone up, I would stiffen. I knew that sitting would make me even more aware of the pain and more upset.

The only solution seemed to be to keep moving. Badly shaken but convinced of my logic, I very slowly walked two more times around the block.

When I reached the point where I had fallen, I saw the uneven pavement, half of the sidewalk raised several inches, almost as if something had buckled it from underneath. I must have walked straight into that edge rather than over it. The square of sidewalk next to it is totally flat.

Admittedly, I had been dictating a note, talking to my phone when I fell, but it seemed simply random that I had veered a bit left instead of right as I meandered down the street and caught that raised seam.

Why weren’t you looking where you were going?

That’s what I was asked.

Do we normally look at our feet while we walk?

I hadn’t hit my head, but I admit I was puzzled. Suddenly, walking seemed a whole lot like trigonometry, and I found myself surprised that any of us manage to avoid all the pitfalls we trust we will simply navigate without issue.

It took a few weeks and a bit of an infected knee to bounce back.

3.
Every time I walk past where I fell, I wonder again how I was supposed to have prevented that. We’re not supposed to walk looking at the ground, I keep telling myself. But, really, how would I have known about that buckled sidewalk if I wasn’t looking? I’ve walked that block dozens of times before and never tripped. Maybe I wasn’t lifting my feet high enough, I tell myself.

4.
I spend very little time on social media these days, but my feed seems to be mostly fitness for seniors. I’m inundated with short videos about how to improve balance and how to strengthen the right muscles to be able to get up off the floor.

Recently, I’ve watched trainers working with elderly people to rebuild their confidence in walking. I find myself both fascinated and terrified by these videos, but we often learn and relearn in unexpected ways.

This week, I watched someone trying to get an older man to lift his chest so that his head was up rather than bent over and looking at the ground right in front of him as he walked a few steps. Despite the reminders, the man instinctively bent his head to the ground, his fear of falling almost palpable.

The problem, the trainer explained, is that when you bend your head to look at the ground, you offset your center of balance, which makes you more likely to fall. When you keep the back and neck straight and the chest lifted, you walk with more stability.

According to the video, instead of looking at the ground directly in front of you, you should be scanning ten feet ahead.

5.
I was walking one morning last week, and I was looking at the ground because, after falling, I’ve worried that I might not be paying enough attention these days. Suddenly, I remembered that video.

Stand up straight.
Scan ahead.

Somewhere along the way, we learn, without even needing to think about it, to walk without always looking at the ground. Walking is, after all, a form of controlled falling. When our confidence, our trust in our ability to navigate uneven terrain, gives way to our fear of falling, we potentially increase our risk of falling.

When you can, scan ten feet ahead.

Be sure to lift your feet, too.

Illustrated Journal

100 Days of Diary Comic Affirmations

I’m still at it. Here are a few recent panels from this project. These are part of a longer, multi-day sequence from last week.

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: Loving a Bent Nib

• 2024: Badges, Lumberjanes, and Gamification

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 12 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish.

• Share something that brings you stability.

• Share an affirmation you hold about hope, perspective, or balance.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!

Paid options are available for those who find value and inspiration in the weekly posts here and want to support Illustrated Life and the #illustrateyourweek prompt series. Subscriptions not your thing? One-time tip jar donations are always appreciated.

Tip Jar

Unless otherwise noted, all images in this post are © A. Cowen. All rights reserved.

Links to books and products at Amazon.com are affiliate links. Always use your library when possible.

Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 12 (2026) — Mar 15-21

Week 12 for 2026! The season changes at the end of the week with the spring equinox. There are lots of ways to nod to spring or shifting days or the balance of things this week. It’s not in the official prompt set, but I encourage you to give a thought to forests, too. Tuck a fact or two into your pages to honor the day. There are quite a few other calendar connections in the list—and a few prompts I lined up that didn’t make it to the image, including “Hops or flies” and “To people or not to people.”

As always, I encourage you to find your own melding of prompts and allusions that fit the feel you want in your pages and blend with the details of your days.

You will find that some weeks, you don’t even need prompts. That’s okay! You might decide you like to use a few of them each week as a personal challenge, or you might only use them when you are feeling the need for an outside nudge.

👉 Calendar connections

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Illustrate Your Week is a flexible project. Each week, I share weekly prompts and calendar notes that can be used as fill-in or fodder for documenting your life with a combination of words and art. Your illustrated journal might be a sketchnote of your week. It might be more like a diary with doodles, or it might be a sketchbook with marginalia. Write or draw as much as you want! You can draw anything on your pages and fill in with your daily notes. There is no one-size-fits-all formula for how to keep an illustrated journal or for what counts.

I encourage you to find your own approach, and don’t be afraid to change week to week as you experiment to find the combination and balance that is most comfortable and satisfying to you. The illustrated journal is a record of your life. Only you can record this story in your unique voice and style.

📌Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started

I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.

You can start your illustrated journal at any time of the week. Just pick up and start where you are with whatever the current week is. These posts may be helpful.

There Are a Lot of Prompts

Should you do them all? Probably not! Prompts are always just ideas for things you might include in your journal. Your immediate life is really where your journal starts — and it may be that your memory life has an equal role. Observances can be a conduit to memory, an excuse to buy and draw (or Google) something simple (like a Twinkie), or simply fun to write down for context in terms of the passage of time.

Daily Notes

Include notes in your pages! As an illustrated journal, the format invites an implicit mix of drawings and words. For me, the project is always a journal, not simply a sketchbook. Even though I draw lots of random things (especially portraits), the book as a whole is a “journal” — an illustrated journal of my life. My daily notes help keep the journal anchored in my life.

Use the Prompts that Speak to You

As always, the prompts are provided simply as optional nudges you may want to mix in with the recording you do of your day-to-day life. If you do Illustrate Your Week for a while, you will find that some prompts recur. (This is a good thing and true to the process of keeping a journal based on your life.) The weekly prompts give you options if you find yourself, pen in hand, and not sure what to draw, paint, write, or record in your journal.

Weekly Calendar Connections

General calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) that can help you “fill in” or anchor pages are behind the paywall below. You can also find this information other places online.

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This week: Why Aren’t You Keeping an Illustrated Journal? ⭐ Looking Back ⭐ Illustrate Your Week Prompts

Hello!

This week’s post falls on the more concrete side of Illustrated Life, a bit of encouragement for anyone who may be curious about keeping an illustrated journal.

I often push aside the more how-to or example pieces in favor of something more creative or more essay-driven. I’m trying to rebalance to bring in more illustrated journal philosophy, techniques, and examples, but I am always a bit torn when I don’t get to write. So, first, just a few fragments from dozens scattered through the week. Some belong to long-term or ongoing projects; some are simply of the week. None are meant to be explained or understood. They simply gather here as a small constellation of words and images:

Standing on tiptoes one morning, I was reminded, unexpectedly, of a simple truth. We can’t be closed to the possibility of discovering something that alters what we thought we knew, even something that changes our understanding of the landscape we have lived with for decades.

The tiny green truck with lightning bolt stickers is translucent and different from the others, a pull-back car with batteries and a slot in the back that holds a penny.

At the library, I watched an elderly woman feign innocence and then realize, with increasing outrage, that she truly had been suspended because of an interaction at another branch and could no longer be on the premises of any branch in the city.

I arrived at the station months too early and kept finding myself there again, over and over, intuiting a leaving not yet scheduled, until suddenly one day I saw the departure I feared on the board.

Someone walked up to where I was standing at the lake watching a night heron that was just a few feet in front of me on the bank and said, giggling, “Oh, look at that bird. Why does it look like a penguin?”

I am always discouraged by the ways in which othering happens, the ways in which groups converge to reinforce shared beliefs without any sense of who they alienate or what the truth of the stream in between might be.

The mouth of the origami creature, a triangular head made from cardstock with colored stripes, button eyes, two pipe cleaners, and a feather rising from the top, is supposed to open when squeezed, revealing a gaping hollow interior like a bird’s beak, but it’s been twenty years since I taught preschoolers to make these, and it seems I have forgotten how to open it.

I fought the clock and the light and bone-deep exhaustion this week.

I saw the golden moon, more yellow than any moon before.

Sometimes, the small fragments that rise are the ones that turn out to hold what matters, kernels that cannot necessarily be reinhabited but still feel like doorways.

Have a good week.

Amy

📌 Why Aren’t You Keeping an Illustrated Journal?

Below are twenty reasons you might think an illustrated journal isn’t for you. In these, you might find echoes of a story you’re telling yourself that keeps you from trying an illustrated journal and, importantly, the counter argument you might need to gently hear.

1. “I’m not an artist.”
   You don’t need to be an artist to start and keep an illustrated journal. At its core, an illustrated journal is a combination of written and visual notes. The process is about documenting life in a visual and accessible format, something you can glance at and see details recorded through time. It is not about creating standalone pieces of art. It is about creating a document of your life.

2. “I don’t have a story worth documenting.”
   The life you record in an illustrated journal is your own. You don’t have to have a “story” to have details to record that represent the days that make up the life you are living. Those details are your story, and it is worth documenting. No beginning, middle, or end is required. You simply need to show up with something from the day or from memory that you want to place alongside any other details already on the page.

3. “I wouldn’t have anything to draw.”
   There is always something to draw. You can draw from your daily life, from your memory, from your imagination, or just doodle on the page. Depending on what you enjoy drawing, there are countless ways to add illustration to your pages, and there are plenty of “everyday matters”-type1 lists and prompt sets, including Illustrate Your Week, to give you ideas when you can’t decide what to draw. But filling pages visually doesn’t necessarily require drawing. You can fill pages with patterns, marks, and symbols that add visual texture to the page. Similarly, you can integrate tracking that may add color, geometry, or pattern as you gather and record data over the week. As you continue to keep your journal, you may find that you draw more frequently, build your own visual icon library, or put a series in motion that you return to each week.

4. “It takes too much time.”
   An illustrated journal doesn’t have to take a lot of time. You can set aside five or ten minutes a day to record a note about the day, and those will add up over a week. Some people do spend more time working on their spreads, but the journal process itself doesn’t require more than you want to spend.

5. “I don’t like projects with a bunch of rules.”
   An illustrated journal is, in many ways, a project without rules. It is a flexible space in which you record your daily life. There is nothing that has to be included each day, and there are no prescribed styles or frameworks. It really is up to you how you fill the space.

6. “It might not be pretty.”
   The illustrated journal doesn’t need to be pretty. While many examples of this type of journal are beautiful, the goal isn’t to simply make a pretty page. The journal is a functional recording of what matters to you and how your life unfolds. Notes aren’t always pretty, though the illustrated journal practice offers a framework in which you can think about how you record them. If you want your journal to have a certain aesthetic, you can build that through weekly spreads that let your aesthetic and voice evolve through repetition and practice. No one is judging what your journal looks like except you.

7. “My handwriting is too messy.”
   Your handwriting is yours. Recording notes in text is part of the foundation of an illustrated journal, and your handwriting becomes texture on the page. You can write in cursive or print or experiment to find the style you find most satisfying and most sustainable. For larger quotes and messages, block lettering is often simple and effective.

8. “I won’t be able to fill pages.”
   If you keep adding to pages, they will fill. But it is important to know that pages don’t have to be full. You can turn a page at any time. Similarly, you can keep adding to pages over days or the span of a week or even multiple weeks. You don’t have to worry at the outset about “filling” pages. You just need to make the first mark or note and then the next one.

9. “It seems intimidating.”
   An illustrated journal is very close in concept to a regular written journal or to a sketchbook, whichever one feels most familiar to you. It can even be mostly text or mostly illustration. It doesn’t need to be complicated, and you may find that it feels like an invitation to slow down and connect with at least a small detail from each day.

10. “I don’t know anything about composition.”
    You don’t have to know anything about composition to start an illustrated journal. You may find it helpful to add squares or circles to the page as containers you can fill in so that you begin to see how the page can be thought of in sections, but you don’t need any formal understanding of composition. Just place something on the page, build around it, and repeat.

11. “My life isn’t interesting enough.”
    You do not have to always be doing something exciting or new to keep and fill an illustrated journal. For many, real life, quotidian life, is often quiet, slow-paced, and routine. That doesn’t mean you have nothing to record. Do you have a favorite mug? Have you noticed how it looks different from different angles? Have you looked at the shape of your hand when you hold the mug? What shadows does the mug cast? What sits on your shelves? What did you eat? What did you think when you woke or when you pulled tarot or when you decided to read, walk, or nap? These are all things that can be described, drawn, and recorded. Your life doesn’t have to be interesting to anyone else, only you. You may even find that seeing your life take shape on the page, week after week, makes you feel more connected, more mindful, more grateful, and more satisfied with life as it is.

12. “It wouldn’t be good enough.”
    You have nothing to prove with an illustrated journal. It just has to satisfy you as a creative and documentation project and make you feel that you are recording things that matter and enjoying the time you spend doing it. Your relationship with your journal is simply that, yours. No one else has a say in whether or not the pages are good enough.

13. “I probably wouldn’t stick with it.”
    You might not, but you might. You might find that you enjoy the process, the end result, or both enough that the habit reinforces itself. The more consistently you show up, the more consistently you fill pages that record your days and give you a beautiful record of your own life, one no one else could have created. This is a creative habit that actively builds and affirms itself. You may find it easier than you think to make it an ongoing part of your weekly landscape.

14. “I don’t have time to do a page a day.”
    You don’t have to fill a page a day in an illustrated journal. Some people do, but you might find that thinking about your journal as a weekly spread takes the pressure off of finishing something each day. With a weekly approach, you don’t need to create a page about each day. Instead, you work on a single spread that builds over a week.

15. “I can’t buy new art supplies.”
    You don’t need new materials to keep an illustrated journal. Online communities often give the impression that buying new things is part of having a creative practice or hint that the next new thing will transform your practice. In reality, you can fill your journal now and always with just a pen or pencil and a notebook. You can use other supplies, but you don’t have to.

16. “Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing.”
    Everyone starts somewhere. Many start by seeing other journals and noticing certain elements they like and trying to replicate those in their own way in their journals. There are no rules, so there is no way to start incorrectly. Start with a note about the day. Add the date or the number of the day or a circle that you fill with a color to represent the day. That’s an entry, and it will be beautiful. You know what to do, instinctively. Just fill the space.

17. “It seems like a waste of time.”
    Only you can decide if keeping an illustrated journal is a waste of time, but you won’t know until you try. If you enjoy the core components—writing and drawing—then it is likely you will enjoy the process of keeping the journal, which makes the time spent not a waste. When the time spent is mindful, enjoyable, or personally enlightening, and you end up with a lasting record, you may even come to realize the time spent amounts to far more than the simple expense of minutes.

18. “It would be too private to share.”
    There is no requirement that your illustrated journal be shared. There is a reason some diaries come with a small key. We learn early on to be protective of our innermost thoughts, desires, and wishes. Your journal can hold your private reality. There are plenty of ways to hide, mask, and obscure things you want to keep private if you decide to share your work online. Don’t let fear of exposure keep you from being truthful or exploring things that others might not understand in your journal. The journal is, first and foremost, a personal tool.

19. “No one will care about my journal.”
    The goal of keeping an illustrated journal is the creation of an artifact of living about which you care. You may find when you sit down and flip through pages of days or weeks that came before that the journal rises up as an anchor or lifeline. It is proof of existence, proof that days were not simply a blur of sameness, and proof that even if time slipped, there was a throughline, a thread of continuity you captured in your own way. If you care, that is enough.

20. “I’m not the kind of person who keeps a visual journal.”
    What kind of person is that? Someone who cares about their life and thinks it is worth recording? That’s all it takes to be the kind of person who keeps an illustrated journal.

Looking Back (Year Over Year)

• 2025: Open the Gate

• 2024: Oddball Sock Critters

Illustrated Journal Prompts

• Prompts for Illustrate Your Week - Week 11 (2026)

Made It?

Thank you for reading.

I always invite you to enter the conversation in any way you wish.

• Are you happy about the time change? Why or why not?

• If you have considered trying an illustrated journal and still not started, what holds you back?

• If you already keep an illustrated journal, what is your favorite thing about the process?

• What is something unexpected you saw or overheard last week?

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