Week 4 Journal Prompts for Illustrate Your Week 2025
Prompts for Week 4 in your illustrated journal
I post a new set of Illustrate Your Week prompts every Sunday to help inspire and nurture the process of keeping an illustrated journal of your life. Add text and images to make a visual record that is uniquely you.
Illustrate Your Week Prompts for Week 4 (2025)
Week 4 for 2025! Does January feel long? I can’t tell. It feels static. It feels quiet. Maybe it feels like things are in slow motion. This may have actually been a really looooong week. Already a lot has happened in the year for this to just be week four, right?
I hope you are finding time (and energy) to make a few notes each day—or a few drawings. While your illustrated journal is a combination of visual elements (including text), you don’t have to draw every day if that isn’t your thing!
❓What is your favorite tool for working in your illustrated journal?
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.
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.
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.
You don’t need a more exciting life. This project celebrates the quotidian.— Amy Cowen
I leave the information below week to week so that anyone finding the prompts will have some guidance no matter what week it is.
Illustrated Journal Basics, Background Information, & How to Get Started
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. You may also find these earlier posts 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.
The time you spend documenting the details of your life can help reinforce and strengthen your memory.
Daily Notes
Make plenty of 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.
While I don’t believe in rules for personal art projects, I do think the personal notes, stories, lists, and tidbits are an important foundation.
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.
Your illustrated journal is a freeform space to hold your personal documentation, memories, hopes, wishes, and the tiny details that make up everyday life. — Amy Cowen
Weekly Calendar Connections
The general calendar connections (a short list of unofficial “observances” and holidays) are behind the paywall this year.
I offer very little incentive for people to upgrade to a paid subscription at Illustrated Life. Putting the calendar connections behind a paywall is a small change. I hope to be offering some additional guidance for subscribers keeping an illustrated journal this year, but this is a start.
The prompts themselves are still available to everyone (above).
This is a minor change and one that I genuinely hope won’t pose a problem for people. (The calendar connections are easy to look up online. The list below is simply a convenience for paid subscribers.)
Please note: “commenting” on a post that is paywalled is not possible without a paid subscription. This is part of the Substack interface, and I apologize. I would always choose to allow everyone to comment. There is a “Sunday post” each week, and you can always comment there if there are questions.
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