Introducing a 28-day Creativity Reset

An invitation to explore your creativity for 28 days in July 2026

I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts lately. Nothing terrible, just pulled in a lot of different directions. I’ve been wondering about my current path and how to continue my artistic practice in the midst of everything else in life. I started my YouTube channel to hold myself accountable as an artist and to track my progress, but it’s so easy to get sucked into the algorithm—to do things just for the sake of growth or subscriber counts.

So, I’ve decided to do a creative reset for myself, and I’m inviting you to join me.

My plan is to host four weeks of themes, each with seven prompts. The idea is to return to the basics, explore memory, dust off some long-languishing art supplies, and fill our notebooks together. For the month of July, I’ll be working entirely in a new notebook (well, actually an old, empty one I rediscovered on a shelf) that is perfect for this project. Everything will be kept in this one place.

Here are the broad-stroke themes for each week:

• Week 1: Looking Back

• Week 2: Discovery

• Week 3: Flow

• Week 4: Looking Forward

My goal is to reignite a spark that has been feeling a little dimmer lately, and to give myself a reason to fill a notebook intentionally in the midst of a hectic summer. I am particularly excited about stripping things back and rediscovering the joy I’ve experienced through the last 10 years of art journaling.

The prompts will be just as relevant for those who only want to write as they are for those who want to create visual art—and everything in between. Spend one day writing and the next day painting! Do both! Skip a day and come back to it later! This is an “anything goes” style challenge. I’ll leave the prompts up here on Substack for easy reference in the coming months if you find it hard to keep up.

How it will work:

• Each Sunday (starting July 5th): I will post the new week of detailed daily prompts, notations, and thoughts here on Substack. Prompts are intended to take about 10 mins for writing and 5-15 minutes for art, but you can take as long or as little time as you need to fit this experience into your schedule.

• Mondays: I plan to go live on YouTube to work through a prompt as a community and chat about how the challenge is going. What is working? What is a struggle? Where do you want to take your work next? I will post the links for these four sessions soon.

I hope you’ll feel inspired to share some of your pages on my YouTube community tab or here in the Substack comments, but I also know that journaling is a deeply personal practice. Any level of participation is wonderful, even if it’s completely private.

Comment below if this sounds like something you need right now! What kind of notebook will you be using?

Thanks as always for reading!

Amanda

p.s., I’ll be using a spiral-bound watercolor notebook from Canson. It’s been sitting there for ages, the spiral makes it the opposite of precious, and the oversized pages are calling to me. Already started to layer up the cover with mod podge… a unique level of satisfaction in that process.