Two Art Prompt Books That Push Your Creativity: Draw Your Own Adventure vs Create This Book

Introduction

Art prompt books sit somewhere between a coloring book and a sketchbook: every page hands you a weird, fun, or oddly specific creative challenge and then gets out of your way. If you have never tried one, the two best-known entries in the space both come from creators who built their audiences around art content. We spent time working through pages from both Draw Your Own Adventure by Chloe Rose Art and Create This Book, Volume 1 by Moriah Elizabeth, and this guide breaks down what each book does well, how the paper holds up to real supplies, and which type of creative person each book suits best.

Draw Your Own Adventure by Chloe Rose Art

Draw Your Own Adventure is the debut prompt book from Chloe Rose Art, and it immediately feels personal. The pages are filled with little holiday references and cozy seasonal ideas, which tracks with a creator who is famously enthusiastic about Christmas. The concept is simple: each page has its own prompt that pushes you to draw things you would never think of on your own, like giving your favorite seasonal foods a smiley face and deciding whether they look menacing or friendly.

The stand-out practical detail is the paper. The pages are made of mixed media paper, and in testing they handled acrylic paint markers with essentially zero bleeding. There was only very minor warping in spots where several layers of paint pens were stacked, which is an impressive result for a book at this price point.

Prompts That Force Creative Thinking

The strongest thing about this book is how the prompts push you sideways. One page asks you to walk into an orchard and invent blended fruits by mixing two different ones together. That kind of constraint sounds trivial, but it genuinely forces ideas you would never have on a blank page: a watermelon with a pumpkin-style stem and carved face, a bunch of grapes where every grape is actually a tiny orange.

It is worth noting that this book is not about producing masterpieces. It is about quick, low-pressure doodling that gets you creating again, and the prompts are written in a playful narrative voice that makes each page feel like a tiny story hook. Some prompts are also designed to take real time, so expect a mix of quick wins and longer projects.

Create This Book, Volume 1 by Moriah Elizabeth

Create This Book, Volume 1 comes from Moriah Elizabeth, one of the pioneering creators in the YouTube art space. The first thing you notice is the size: this is a genuinely chunky book, with around 229 pages to color, not counting the front page, which is also designed to be decorated. If value per page matters to you, this book is hard to beat.

The prompts lean more open-ended and journal-like. One asks you to draw the same object over and over using a different medium each time, which turns a single page into a mini supply experiment. Another simply says “make this page your favorite,” leaving the medium entirely up to you, whether that is paint, collage, photos, or stickers.

How the Paper Handles Different Mediums

This is where the two books differ most. The front of Create This Book includes guidance on which supplies work best, and it specifically recommends using a separate sheet of paper for wet media and gluing the result into the book. Dry supplies like colored pencils, crayons, and paint pens work fine directly on the page, but alcohol markers and watercolor will bleed through, which is visible when you turn the page.

That is not a flaw so much as a design decision: with a book this thick, the paper is thinner than a dedicated mixed-media pad. If you want to work wet-on-page, plan your pages or embrace a little bleed. Draw Your Own Adventure, by contrast, lets you commit acrylic markers straight onto the page without worry.

Which One Should You Buy

Pick Draw Your Own Adventure if you want thick mixed-media paper, playful seasonal themes, and prompts that work beautifully with paint markers. Pick Create This Book, Volume 1 if you want maximum variety and sheer volume, with more open-ended, journal-style prompts that invite collage and mixed approaches. Many people will honestly enjoy both, since the prompt styles complement each other rather than compete.

Conclusion

Both books succeed at the core promise of an art prompt book: they drag you out of your creative rut and make you draw things you would never choose yourself. Draw Your Own Adventure wins on paper quality and cozy personality, while Create This Book, Volume 1 wins on volume and open-ended freedom. Either one is a genuinely fun way to spend an evening with a pencil.