10 Fun Fall Prompts for Your Art Journal 🍂
There is something about fall that makes me want to pull out every paint, marker, scrap of paper, old book page, and half-forgotten art supply I own.
Maybe it’s the colors. Maybe it’s the cooler evenings. Maybe autumn just gives us permission to slow down, make a cup of something warm, turn on some music, and spend an hour making something for absolutely no reason other than it feels good to create.
And that is exactly what these prompts are for.
You don't need expensive supplies, and you definitely don't need to make anything worthy of hanging in a gallery. Use old magazines. Scribble with crayons. Glue leaves into your journal. Spill coffee on the page. Write crooked. Paint outside the lines.
Make a mess.
Here are ten little autumn adventures for your art journal.
1. 🍁 Gathered From the Ground
Take a walk and collect a few little pieces of autumn—fallen leaves, tiny twigs, dried flowers, seed pods, or anything else that catches your eye.
Use them to inspire a page. Trace around them, paint them, photograph them, make leaf rubbings, or attach something flat directly to the page.
Add a few words about where you were and what the day felt like.
2. ☕ Paint Your Perfect Fall Morning
Imagine you have nowhere to go.
No alarm. No errands. No obligations.
What would your perfect October morning look like?
Create a page filled with coffee cups, blankets, books, cats, rainy windows, pancakes, candles, messy hair, or whatever belongs in your version of a slow autumn morning.
Finish the page with:
My perfect fall morning begins with...
3. 🎨 Make an Autumn Color Explosion
Choose five or six colors that feel like autumn to you.
They don't have to be traditional orange and brown, either. Maybe your autumn is mustard yellow, dusty pink, plum, midnight blue, cream, and gold.
Cover the page using only those colors.
Paint. Scribble. Stamp. Collage. Doodle.
Don't try to make a picture.
Just let the colors play.
4. 🌙 Create an October Moon Page
Imagine walking outside on a chilly October night and discovering the moon looking impossibly enormous.
Create a dreamy moon-themed page.
Add stars, black branches, clouds, moths, ravens, wildflowers, little houses, handwritten poetry—whatever feels like nighttime magic.
Then write one secret beneath the moon that you don't normally say out loud.
5. 🥧 Make a Fall Recipe Page
Choose something that tastes like autumn to you.
Pumpkin bread. Chili. Apple pie. Tomato soup and grilled cheese. Cinnamon rolls. Your grandmother's cornbread.
Write the recipe into your journal, but turn the entire page into artwork.
Draw ingredients. Add scraps of packaging. Paint tiny spoons and mixing bowls. Let the page become part cookbook, part memory.
Bonus points for getting a mysterious flour fingerprint on it.
6. 🧥 Design Your Autumn Alter Ego
Who are you in an alternate autumn universe?
Maybe you're a mysterious poet living above a bookshop.
A witch who owns a tiny café.
An artist living alone in a cottage in the mountains.
A glamorous woman wandering through 1970s New York.
Create your character.
Design their outfit, home, favorite drink, hobbies, books, personality, and little pieces of their life.
For one journal page, you get to be somebody else.
7. 📚 Build a Cozy Collage
Grab old magazines, junk mail, scrapbook scraps, book pages, stickers, packaging, fabric—anything you're willing to cut apart.
Now hunt for things that make you think:
I want to crawl inside this picture and live there.
Cut them out and build your dream autumn world.
Add little handwritten phrases between the images until the page feels like a visual love letter to fall.
8. 🍂 Make Art From an Autumn Memory
Think about a fall memory you haven't thought about in a while.
A Halloween costume.
Walking home from school.
A first date.
A pumpkin patch.
Your childhood bedroom in October.
A person you miss.
Don't worry about illustrating exactly what happened.
Instead, paint the feeling of the memory.
What colors was it?
What did the air smell like?
What tiny detail do you still remember?
Sometimes memory makes more interesting art than reality ever could.
9. 🔮 Create a Little Fall Magic
Invent your own completely imaginary autumn spell.
Maybe it's a spell for courage.
A spell for letting go.
A spell for creativity.
A spell for cozy mornings.
Or perhaps you desperately need a spell that magically makes the laundry fold itself.
Give your spell a ridiculous or beautiful name and illustrate the ingredients.
Acorns. Cinnamon. Moonlight. Coffee. Maple leaves. Three drops of rain. One whispered secret.
There are no rules because you're inventing the magic.
10. 🧡 Make an “Everything I Love About Fall” Page
For the final prompt, fill an entire spread with every tiny thing you love about this season.
Write words sideways.
Draw little pictures.
Glue things down.
Make lists.
Add quotes.
Use photographs.
Scribble in the margins.
Pumpkins. Foggy mornings. Horror movies. Cardigans. Leaves crunching under your shoes. Halloween candy. Apple cider. Old books. Soup simmering on the stove. Rain against the windows.
Keep going until there isn't much empty space left.
Let it be gloriously cluttered.
Your Journal Doesn't Have to Be Pretty
That's probably my favorite thing about art journaling.
It doesn't have to become anything.
You don't have to sell it. You don't have to frame it. You don't have to show anyone. You don't even have to like every page when you're finished.
An art journal can simply be a place where you play.
So this fall, give yourself permission to waste paint. Cut up the pretty paper you've been saving. Use the stickers. Scribble over something you hate. Glue another piece of paper on top and begin again.
Make strange things.
Make beautiful things.
Make terrible things.
Make pages that smell faintly like coffee and have dried leaves falling out of them six months later.
Because sometimes the best reason to make art is simply that October made you want to. 🍁
