Notebook Doodle Ideas: 11 Cute Themes To Try From My Own Pages

If you’ve been searching for how to doodle inspiration that’s real, hand-drawn, and not AI-generated, you’ve landed in the right notebook.

I’ve been doodling since 2018, and every single sketch in this post came straight from my own pen, no digital shortcuts, no generated art, just doodles I actually drew in my actual notebooks.

This is a collection of notebook doodles across a bunch of themes, and every single one is simple enough to recreate on your own pages.

Grab a pen, flip through, and pick your favorites to add to your notebook this week.

Doodling is not something I learned anywhere in particular – ot’s kind of the skill I picked up myself when I started journaling specifically for the purpose of adding doodles to my notebook.

And this is coming from me – most of my life I could only draw a smiley face and one eye (somehow in the early 2000s we all were drawing just one eye).

So I have no doubt you can replicate all these doodles too; you just need some practice.

And if you need some extra help, be sure to check out my FREE doodling course where I share all the tips and tricks you need to start doodling like a pro.

That being said, let’s dive into doodles!

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Doodling Supplies

These doodles are easy and don’t require any supplies. But here is what I’d recommend you prepare:

A comfortable pencil to hold
Fineliner
Eraser
Drawing paper
Markers; some that I used are: Tombow Dual Brush, Zebra Mildliners, Crayola Supertips, and Tombow Twin Tone

That’s all; let’s dive in!

Notebook Doodle Ideas

There are several categories and completely different themes, so keep scrolling to find one that excites you most. Plus, each idea comes with tips I used to make the doodles stand out, so don’t miss these golden nuggets.

Simple Doodles

This is where I always tell people to start, whether you’re brand new to doodling or just need a low-pressure page to fill. Just a bunch of random little sketches: hearts, stars, tiny clouds, a coffee cup here, a wonky flower there.

One great idea is to join a monthly doodling challenge (like I did when creating this page). We actually have monthly doodling challenges and doodling tutorials in our membership, if you want to check that out.

This page is proof that you really don’t need to be “good at drawing” to fill a notebook with doodles you’ll actually like flipping back to.

For the white gel pen here, I used a Sakura Gelly Roll pen, which is my favorite gel pen out there. I also used another trick here: I used a light grey marker to create a little shadow effect around each doodle; I think it helps create a bit of 3D effect.

Fall Doodles

Fall is hands-down one of my favorite doodling seasons, and I’m not even a little sorry about it. Think leaves in every shade of orange, cozy sweaters, acorns, and little mugs of something warm.

This page is perfect inspiration if you’re setting up an autumn spread, or if you just want your notebook to feel like a crisp October afternoon.

I wanted to keep it simple and in black and white, but here are a few other tricks for enhancing your doodles.

First – I feel like if you use color, your doodles already become more fun and interesting (and for me this is also a way to bring attention away from how shaky my lines are sometimes).

Another idea is to use one color and color just one part of your doodle, as I did here with the mushroom doodle.

Finally, the last trick here is to use a thicker pen to outline the doodle – it really helps the doodle to pop. This is what I did here on the coffee cup doodle.

Pastel Halloween Doodles

I love Halloween doodles, but I especially love them in soft pastels instead of the usual black and orange. This page reimagines spooky season in blush pink, lavender, and mint: pastel ghosts, gentle bats, and soft little pumpkins.

If you want Halloween vibes without going full haunted house, this page is for you.

I think changing up traditional color schemes always makes your doodles stand out, like using pastel for Halloween or black and white for Christmas. And in case you wonder, for these I used my long-time favorite pastel Tombow Dual Brush Pens set – it was the first set of brush pens I got back in 2018, and it’s still one of my top favorites.

Spring Doodles

Spring doodles are basically permission to draw bright and happy doodles – after all, this is the season when everything is finally waking up from the dull grey winter months.

It’s great inspiration for a spring bucket list, a garden spread, or just a page that feels a little more hopeful.

A great trick to make your doodles more interesting and fun is to add animated faces. That way, you can play around with what kind of emotions you want your doodles to show.

Summer Doodles

Summer is my favorite season of the year (it’s also my birthday season, so I’m a little biased), and it shows in how many summer doodle pages I’ve filled over the years.

This page is full of sunshine, popsicles, sunglasses, and everything else that makes summer feel like summer.

Here I also followed my favorite trick – when you draw your doodles smaller, it automatically makes them look cuter. To take it even one step further, I also used thinner fineliners to draw every doodle. If you compare with other doodles on the list, you’ll see how much change you get by just using different pen thickness.

More Summer Doodles

I couldn’t stop at just one summer page, so here’s round two. This time, I wanted to try drawing them in black and white and see how much it changes the feeling and look of the doodles.

When drawing in black and white, I like a few tricks to make my doodles more interesting.

First of all, I like adding extra details – you’ll see there is a lot of hatching and many different lines in almost every doodle to just make it look a bit more interesting.

The second thing is to color part of the doodle completely black. You can see in my doodle of a camera and flip-flop, for example. I think having one element of your doodle completely black helps to make it stand out.

Travel Doodles

Even when I’m not going anywhere, I love doodling like I am. This page is full of suitcases, little planes, passports, and postcard-style details.

It’s one of my favorite pages to flip back to when I’m daydreaming about the next trip, or just need a reminder that one is coming eventually.

There isn’t really a special trick I used for these doodles, but I just wanted to mention here how travel doodles are very simple to draw – you can clearly see which basic shapes each doodle is made of.

Cleaning Doodles

This might be the most random page in this whole post, but hear me out: cleaning doodles are weirdly satisfying to draw. Spray bottles, sponges, little laundry baskets — all the small chores that somehow look cuter as doodles than they ever look in real life.

These doodles were my go-to for all cleaning-related pages in my Bullet Journal. And there is one thing I wanted to note.

When it comes to tech, like vacuum sealers in this case, I find it much more fun to draw tech from the old days, when it was colorful, fun, and had more interesting designs. Tech now is great to use, but the designs are a bit too boring, so I always recommend going retro when it comes to doodling.

Fruit and Vegetable Doodles

I have a soft spot for giving fruits and vegetables tiny faces — it’s such an easy trick to make any doodle instantly cuter. This page is basically a whole produce aisle of doodles: strawberries, avocados, carrots, all with a little personality of their own.

In this case, I also tried to make the facial expressions fit the fruits or vegetables, like a crying onion or a spicy pepper.

Usually you won’t see me using bright colors like that in my journal, but I think this works very well for this theme. To get the same effect, I used Tombow Twin Mono Markers.

Sushi Drawing

Doodling food is one of my favorite doodle challenges, and sushi might be the most fun to draw. All the little rolls, chopsticks, and soy sauce dishes came together on this page, and I promise they’re way easier to doodle than they are to actually make.

I must say, I used these doodles for my Bullet Journal theme in spring 2020, and it’sstill one of my favorite monthly setups to date!

The hard thing to do here for me was to draw seaweed – you don’t want it to be pure back because then you won’t be able to draw faces and such on top of it, plus pure black will be too strong and take too much attention.

This is where the greyscale Tombow Dual Brush pens came to my rescue – they have a perfect shade of dark grey.

Makeup Doodles

Doing my makeup is one of my go-to little self-care moments, so it only made sense to turn it into a doodle page too. Lipstick tubes, perfume bottles, tiny compact mirrors — this page is basically my vanity table in doodle form.

Makeup doodles are easy and fun to draw for several reasons. First, there are so many references out there with bottles and packaging in all kinds of shapes. Second, they come in all kinds of colors, so it’s really up to you what kind of aesthetic you want to go with.

For these doodles, I used my Crayola Super Tips – I have a pack of 150 colors, and they are pretty affordable as well, so I can’t get enough of them. Plus, their special tip lets you use them for brush lettering, too.

Stationery Drawing

This is probably my favorite theme on this entire list. I have a genuine stationery hoarding problem (zero regrets), and doodling my own supplies is such a fun way to put that love to good use.

As you can see in my other black-and-white doodles, I added a lot of extra lines (the line-dot-line combination is my favorite) to make them a bit more interesting.

Free Doodling Course

If you’re feeling unsure about your creativity or your ability to doodle, don’t worry — I’ve got you. I’ve been exactly where you are, staring at a blank page and convinced drawing just wasn’t in the cards for me.

So I packed everything I learned into a free step-by-step doodling course for beginners, made to take you from “I can’t even draw a stick figure” to “wait, I actually made this?”

Simply sign up using the form below, and once you confirm your subscription, you’ll get all the details.

More Resources

Are you looking for more doodle ideas, inspiration, and tutorials? I’ve got you covered with plenty more resources on this blog.

Check out these posts next:

>>> What other notebook doodles do you want to see? Share with us in the comments!

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And remember: Keep Journaling, and Don’t Be A Blob!