Joy Experiments in July

Here we go.

The sketchbook is open, the glue stick is out, and we’re really doing this.

31 days.

15 minutes.

One page at a time.

Grab your sketchbook and make the first one with me. No plan, no pressure, just begin. I’m so glad you’re here. 🌿

In May, I gave myself a tiny dare: make one small thing every day, just to see what happened. It turned into a inspiring, creative outlet and attracted lots of lovely Substackers into my feed.

So I’m doing it again — and this time, I want you in.

Joy Experiments in July is a daily creative challenge: one collage a day, in your sketchbook, for the whole month. That’s it. No rules about being “good.” No pressure to share. Just fifteen or twenty minutes of cutting, sticking, and seeing what shows up on the page.

Fifteen minutes. That’s the whole ask. Do it with your morning coffee or while dinner’s in the oven.

In May, I ran a version of this with a stamp + punch technique and had more fun than I’d had in ages… the loose, playful, no-stakes kind of fun we forget to make time for as adults. July’s is even simpler. Pretty, easy, small. A creative practice that fits into a real life.

I’ve spent years teaching people how to make vision boards (over three thousand of them and counting) and I’ve talked about it on NBC News twice.

What I keep coming back to is that the magic isn’t in the finished thing. It’s in the fifteen minutes you give yourself. The collage is just the format we’re choosing.

If you subscribe, you’ll get a daily Note of the page I made, and a line or two about what it held, plus a longer reflection at the end of each week where I tell you what’s actually surfacing. And there’s something coming in the post at the end of the month for a small group of you. More on that when we’re closer.

It’s free to follow along. I’d love your company.

Do this now…

• Subscribe so you don’t miss the daily prompts and details.

• Grab a sketchbook (my fave is an Ottogami Sketchbook), a glue stick, and a stack of anything you can cut up (magazines, packaging, old cards)

• No brief. No rules about composition. One page, one feeling, one found image.

• Show up for July, one small page at a time

I’ll be sharing prompts, my own pages, and a few gentle nudges to keep you going all month.

Here we go! I’ll be dropping my collages each day below… hope you enjoy!

Seeing all the collages together feels like a big long story. There were definitely some moments in time that I revisited: my divorce from a French man, my brother’s death, and mostly my love of colour and patterns is evident across the pages.

Do you have a favourite?

Xo, Louise 🫶