Nature Journaling and Field Sketching

Very helpful exercise to turn off what you THINK you see and focus on what you ACTUALLY see!

This upside-down drawing exercise was amazing. It very much improved the accuracy of my drawing, and I believe it will be an extremely useful skill in the field.

Oh no, not a Carolina wren but a song sparrow.  Oh dear.  See how much I was concentrating on the shape!?

A fun and challenging exercise! I really took my time with it, used the proportions tool throughout, looked at negative space, erased when needed, and focused constantly on the relationships of the shapes and forms. I am happy with how it came out, both upside down and right-side up!

The upside-down drawing was difficult, and fun.  It surprised me that it turned out so well.

April 19, 2023.  A backhanded compliment coming up: Dear Liz - that was painful - but I have to hand it to you - now I feel like I can do absolutely anything. That exercise perfectly combined everything you demonstrated in this lesson and the previous one as well. Although I know the song sparrow, I found that because it was upside down and looking over its shoulder, all familiar landmarks were gone and I had to follow negative shapes, proportions, relative positions, contours. Wow.

This was difficult exercise.  It was difficult to see the relationships between the shapes as well as proportion.  It seems that the brain really wants to fill in what the eyes see (or don't).  I had to do a lot of erasing.  I think this was an excellent exercise to really focus on shapes, negative spaces, etc.  Thank you.

This took a long time and was difficult, but really interesting. I'm left handed so I started from the right (the "bottom" of the branch). I did see the subject as a bird, but tried to stay focused on the individual shapes and draw them sequentially. Lots of erasing too...

An interesting exercise, but very difficult to bring in the proportion and scale in control. Need a lot of practice. Felt happy that I am able to draw the images even if they are not sharp, and accurate and need more refinement.  Yes, I was trying to view the sparrow as what it was and then slowly realized to concentrate on the shapes, lines, and scale.

Kaia's Drawing

Kaia's Mom's Drawing

It was fun and pushes you to look at the lines not the whole drawing.  But I think it was harder to get proportions correct and I did more erasing than if I sketched looking at a complete picture.

I found no how hard I tried, I could not draw the seed pod first.  I had to draw the sparrow and then the seed pod.  I needed an anchor so I could get the direction placement of shapes.  I found this very challenging.

Not too bad (though the belly is a bit fluffy!). I noticed as I got into drawing that I stopped worrying about drawing a sparrow, but the forms of a sparrow. I started to recognize how negative space influences the relationship of shapes and how the "landmarks" in perception allowed me to recognize when a shape was too high, too small, too big, etc. Fun exercise!

  This was very challenging and very engaging--not so much fun as absorbing!

Wow, that was really hard and I didn’t quite get it right but it was a lot of fun. I did it in pencil then inked the lines and erased the pencil—no I didn’t draw it in ink :)    

Lol!  That was sooo tempting.

It was interesting drawing the sparrow upside down. I knew it was a sparrow, but I really tried to focus on the shapes and the negative and positive spaces.

I was surprised by how much easier it was to focus on shapes when drawing upside down & how well the final drawing turned out.