This course was a Christmas gift from my daughter. She knows that I have been enjoying using watercolors for the past several years. I have filled a number of sketchbooks with internet tutorials, and now feel ready to sort of branch out on my own.  I am interested mainly in painting  plant life..  I don’t think my vision is good enough to capture birds.  I like the idea of making a month by month journal of things observed in my yard.

1. I recently became disabled by a chronic illness and am no longer able to many of the things I used to. My therapist recommended nature journaling as a way to connect with my body, my world, and immerse myself in nature more thoroughly. 2. I love the color and adding a color palette to the entries to remind me of the colors I observed. I also loved the idea of capturing an event (i.e. birds in different positions or spider spinning its dinner) as well as still life. 3. I got something valuable from every journal that was shared. They are all so unique and there are several components from each journal that gave me so much insight.

I go for frequent walks in nature as exercise and meditation. Nature journaling allows me to notice things that I used to miss. It helps me slow down and be in the moment. I can share these moments with family and friends as well. I appreciated all the examples in the lesson. I sketch with pencil and add color later when I get back home, but I'm going to take watercolor pencils and/or watercolor with me from now on. I really liked the idea of recording the colors observed on the journal page with watercolor. I would also like to add detailed drawings of plants. My focus has been on birds so far. Here's a page from my journal.

2.  March 11, 2025:  I really appreciate the generosity of the journalers who have shared their journals with us.  I feel encouraged by all of them, and they all provided constructive information.  Shayna - with her boxes and allowing the sketches to escape the borders, the zooms with detail, notes with observations and questions.   Jewel - showing how she started, developed and advanced nicely.  William - with the blue-footed boobies in the Galapagos and motion or the boobies and the water by the rocks.  Margaret - the hummingbird sketches and handling motion as I have hummingbirds, and they are always moving very quickly so they require a lot of study.  D.J. McNeil - showing the use of geometric shapes and showing behaviors to accurately capture the bird or species is so helpful to me.  Holly Faulkner - I love the beauty and accuracy of your journal with the lovely illustrations, dates, notes.  I aspire to creating a journal like that someday.

1.  March 1, 2025:  Ever since I was a very small child, I have loved nature and studied nature - the birds, the plants, the insects, animals, sea and its creatures.   In some of the countries I grew up in complete nature guides were not readily available plus all the species had not (to this day) been discovered and identified.  Nature journaling would have been and is a way to portray in the most accurate and beautiful way I am capable of all that I observe and study.

1. My goal is to create the habit of drawing everyday. The act of drawing (and painting) is a joyful meditation for me. I hope the regular practice will help me to be more present and calm. (I made the watercolor painting last summer.) 2 I was inspired by the artist who created a drawing everyday.

#1. The love of nature was the inspiration begin nature journaling. I love to learn, especialy about nature, and I was intriguied with the idea of capturing nature on pages. Plus, I will have this course and the journals I create to capture a period of time that my chikdren and grandchildren can look back upon.  #2. Actually, all of the journalers processes inspired me and I would like to try to incoporate atleast one technique from each journaler into my own journaling. Yet, if I have to choose one, I liked the idea of boxing on the picture and label for each image, the date box, the scientific name, etc.

Today is day 1 of an activity called "The 100 Day Art Project". I chose to finally re-start this course. I started sketching last May and I really like it. In this Liz' course, once I got to the water color module, I shut down and put it away. This was probably 4-5 months ago, at least. I purchased this course about 2 years ago. So this 100 Day Art Project endeavor is helping me to take steps every day and once I get to the water color section, just go for it. don't worry about messing up pages, not doing it right, just allowing myself to be a beginner. I liked what all four people had to offer as far as their style of journaling. I really liked #1 and perhaps eventually will advance to this. For now, I'm going to be happy including anything, without judgement. Baby steps.

I have always been an outdoors person.  Started a nature journaling class with the local parks system in Jan 2022 and love it.  the pictures loaded were a weekly effort from last year, here are Jan-Mar and Oct-Dec.  Used the same tree for the 4 seasons (Jan-Mar, Apr-June, July-Sept, and Oct-Dec.)  Mostly outdoors pictures but some things that caught my eye.  This year is a bed of flowers through the seasons. art skills still lacking, better at photography then printing and putting in my nature journal.

I really enjoyed seeing all the different approaches taken in the Nature Journals video and I would like to incorporate elements from each style.   I feel most at peace when sat in nature with the sound of birds around me and hope to use this practice to be even more mindful everyday.  It will be quite a challenge for me though as I am not used to drawing nature, I am more used to photographing it.  I hope to maybe mix the pages up at some point with snippets of drawn, written and photographed subjects.

I practiced nature journaling with my children as a homeschooling activity.  I enjoy using watercolor and looking up tutorials on how to draw my own observations.  We also used the Seek app to help us identify flora and fauna.  My favorite thing to do is to keep a phenology wheel and track the moon phases as the focal piece of my nature journal spread for the month.  Then, I journal around it with sketches as I'm able through the month.

Nature journaling is a complete learning process. Each day we will learn something new from nature journaling as we observe and learn from the nature. I want to have a try on journaling the place I'm visiting with all the information I can gather about the ecosystem like weather conditions , species I observed etc...Im doing nature journaling of about a particular species everytime instead of full details I observed, so I want to have a try on what all things I can observe and journal it with full details. Here I am attaching a copy of my nature journaling I did a year back. It's about Blue Tailed Green Bee Eater, a migrant visitor to Kerala.

I love the ideas you provide for nature journaling, but I would also love to record and interpret the landscapes with watercolors. I am very excited to have signed up for this course. Although, I am just learning to paint with watercolors on my own, I would like to learn to paint animals, plants and landscapes. Here is my first attempt at a landscape with watercolors, although it is not a good one because the transparencies are not visible, I believe that practice makes perfect.

I am a field scientist in Panama and honestly ... There are a lot of LONG-BORING days sometimes on research plots. I started drawing and sketching stuff form fun to pass time at Basecamp. I want to get better in technical skills.

I chose this course to work on practice in many things:   to practice the discipline of keeping a journal;  to practice setting aside time for drawing and painting;  to practice making intentional time away from the distractions of "civilized" life, screens, and even my camera; and especially to deepen the practice of noticing, in hopes of following Mary Oliver's "Instructions for Living a Life": Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” I loved seeing the variety of styles in each nature journal, the differing technicques, and the evolution of the journals--including Holly's sharing that keeping up with a daily entry was a bit intense, and that working on a monthly journal was a more reasonable approach.  Thank you all for sharing your entries so we could learn from your work.

1.  I wanted to develop my skills at drawing and apply them to wildlife and nature.  I also assume that this will force me to look at nature more quietly and carefully, in more detail. 2.  I liked seeing the different approaches and for me, I want less "volume" and more selective focus on a few special landscapes, natural features or wildlife.  For me, it will not be so much a journal as a "highlight reel". 3. I have a general question- does anyone use a camera to photograph what they wish to enter, and then at their leisure draw and/or describe them in their journals?  I want to do that, at least part of the time.

1. I've got lists everywhere: flowers in bloom on a hike, spring bird arrival dates during migration, native plants observed on a walk with little notes in brackets about colours or locations. Then I've got a pile of random photos on my phone: plants, mushrooms, birds, insects with no way of making notes. I've got observations in eBird and iNaturalist and in my phone notes and in paper notebooks. I've been trying to figure out for years how to put all my observations together to capture the information and details that I want to remember. I've considered scrapbooking, printing photos and putting them in an album so I could make notes, drawing charts with colours to capture what plants are in bloom and when but nothing really seemed to make sense. I feel like nature journaling could be the answer and I'm going to find out. I've never considered myself much of an artist or really thought that I'd have the ability to actually capture what I see through sketches (hence all the photos) but I'm excited to begin and see where this takes me and to see if it gives me a sense of completion and satisfaction that I've finally captured the wonders that I see when I'm out in nature.

1.  and 4. Thank you to everyone for graciously sharing your nature journals! I took notes while watching, and got several ideas. Shayna's way of zooming into a detail of a subject (the maple leaf), and the way she painted only part of a moth, not feeling the need to paint it in its entirety. Jewel's page with swatches of color, and saying "It's enough to know all of these colors were present that day," letting me know it's OK not to feel compelled to create a complete sketch with the colors I've recorded. D.J.'s 3 action sketches of the spider he was observing helped him create an interesting narrative about the spider's behavior. Everyone mentioning that they spent a lot of time just looking, and a lot of time on a single sketch -- demonstrates patience! I live in New York City. At first I thought "Nature? Here?" Then I reflected on what's here and became very optimistic: 30,000 acres of parkland, a coastline, forests, marshes, a Wildlife Refuge (more than one, actually). 400 species of birds. I reflected on wildlife I've seen over time, including the red-tailed hawk that inhabits my college campus and who mates every year. The opossum who showed up in a trap my neighbors and I set to catch feral cats so we could take them to a shelter. One day last winter, I even came across an American Woodcock in my neighborhood in Queens. Habitat: moist woods, brushy swamps -- ahh, the Jamaica Wildlife Refuge is nearby! Thank you again for inviting me into your journals. I look forward more than ever to following your endeavors, and to creating my nature journey, knowing that my urban habitat has so much to offer me. Lorraine

Watching the introductory video for this class on nature journaling gave me a deep sense of peace and a desire to do this more often. My mom was an artist, and she used to encourage me to make sketches of places that I traveled to. My grandmother made a series of nature journals (mostly Northern California wildflowers) that she completed from the 1980s until around 2017, when she passed away. They are beautiful and I think about them often. I also have my own nature journal from an online class I took several years ago on spiders. My journal contains sketches and information about spiders that I found in my backyard. I would like to commit to using a nature journal on any future trips I might take, as well as using it in my own backyard and neighborhood when I have the time and need to feel connected to nature. I love the watercolors, and I would like to try to use that more often. Adding in a short description about whatever I am sketching also appeals to me.

feeling a little awkward at this point... but ready to give this a go. winter weather keeps me inside but I have a lot of windows! still plenty to observe!

1. I am trying to learn how to draw birds and I love to watercolor so I thought this was perfect   2. I also have lots of practice pages loose in boxes so I thought themed journals may be nice to try

1. The decision to start a nature journal wasn't quite a 'decision' in that I can't consider it a deliberate action. It kind of just happened. I'm passionate about nature, writing, birding and bird/nature photography. A few months ago I rediscovered drawing, which I'd never practised on a regular basis, but was suddenly intrigued by more and more. I managed to incorporate it in my creative tasks and work, and now there's no going back. I've done a bit of experimenting with pencil and coloured pencils so far, with very little watercolours. I wanted to try a more structured approach, but one that wouldn't force me into too strict a routine, and before I knew it, I was starting this course. 2. My idea is to combine visual work with writing and journal regularly. I've never had a nature journal, so I haven't given myself too many guidelines to begin with: this visual-written approach is my starting point. The other ground rule is to not make this a 'task to perform' and not be too strict on the frequency of the exercise. I'm always very strict with myself with things I have to do, and I don't want this to be something I 'have to do', I want it to be a free space where I experiment as much as I can and remind myself to keep doing it regularly compatibly with all other things and activities on my agenda. PS. I appreciated a lot all contributors' insights, it's very enriching and inspiring to read through them. Cheers!

1. I spend a lot of time in nature already and I've started doing watercolors--seemed like a good time to combine the two. 2. I love the note-taking to prompt more research; I love the idea of documenting questions and curiosities that arise. One person had their color palette on each page, and that's a beautiful touch. I am a big fan of color study. 3. I also like to add physical pieces to my journals -- dried flower/grass, leaf, feather, etc.