Nature Journaling and Field Sketching

I took the Drawn to Birds Course last week and it inspired me to take up drawing and especially painting birds and making a journal.

I took the Drawn to Birds workshop last weekend. I like the lady who had the daily drawing at first, not because I feel like I want to or could draw every day, but I liked her realistic depictions of birds, and that's what I aspire to do. I live on the Rhode Island shoreline, so we have a large variety of shorebirds and some migratory birds that pass through. I've always been good at sketching, but mostly because I'm an engineer. I sketch inanimate objects well. Now that I'm semi-retired, I'd like to expand to birds as well, and the Drawn to Birds workshop really helped with that. This looks like a good next step to depict some of our local birds, with some information and background scenery. Experimenting with watercolors will be completely new to me.

Hello from rainy Belize. I took "Drawn to Birds: A Sketching Workshop with Liz Clayton Fuller" last week and really enjoyed it. I want to learn more about sketching and drawing. I have a pretty cool backyard - howlers, birds, Mayan temples of Lamanai, jungle, insects, etc - and I do write sightings in my daily journal, but I want to do a better job. I like Holly Faulkner's idea to start with. Nov 19 - Oropendolas calling from Cohune tree during a break in the rain! Thank you!

I love to travel, camp and hike and would like to record my observations and practice my sketching on a more regular basis.  As a retired Librarian, Master Gardener, past Girl Scout and Boy Scout Leader,  I love to research about the animals and plants in the places I visit.  Journaling will offer me the opportunity to explore, draw, paint and research a variety of topics.  I will be 70 next month and I hope to never stop being curious about the world around me. I hope to use the boxes to guide my drawings, paintings and observations.  I am ready to get started!

1. I like the idea of having my own field guide - to look back on experiences and help recall details of the day that might of otherwise been forgotten.  It will also make it easier to share with others & deepen my own learning and understanding of my surroundings. 2. I like the idea of using "boxes" to help me get started in organizing my thoughts & observations.  To get my art on the page first, and include details around it.  I like the idea also of trying daily/weekly/monthly.  Lastly, I like the idea as well that not every page has to  be "perfect" - that even an incomplete sketch can still evoke memories.

I've often thought of including sketches in my travel journals over the years but rarely did it.  I saw this course and thought I might get some tips to motivate me.  Of course, I'm not travelling now and it's almost winter.  On top of that, I am at home recovering from surgery.  However , on the positive side, I have lots of time on my hands to try something new.  I'm hoping I can find things outside the window or in my backyard to get started.

1.  Inspired to begin nature journal by a deep desire to give it a try it.  I often stand and stare intently at natural objects or living critters in an effort to really "see" and connect with what I'm looking at.  I am 77 years old and have always felt inhibited when it comes to any type of art expression.  Probably some long ago criticism shut me down.  It's time for me to "get over it." 2.  Margaret's very free pencil sketches of the humming birds was inspiring.  Quick sketch, quick sketch, observe, and SEE!  Jewel's sharing of her struggle to "find her style" is encouraging.  Shayna's open boxes for her drawings appeals to me.  Various journals have incomplete drawings, DJ said, "You don't have to catch all the features."  I've dabbled in watercolor and would like to incorporate that into my journal. 3.  All of the the featured journalist drawings were wonderful!  I admire the freedom to simply do it.  This is what I wish for myself and anyone else diving into Nature Journaling.

I love nature and when I walk or hike I often find something that I love and wish to remember....such as droplets of rain on a fallen leaf, or my backyard birdfeeder filled with birds waiting their turn or squabbling over available space. This course seems perfect for me.  I also enjoy drawing and painting although watercolor will be a new experience. What fun this will be?

1. What inspired you to begin nature journaling? My background is in biology. In my free time I have always been happiest outside in nature and have always had the casual hobby of sketching, mostly influenced by nature, particularly birds. I consider myself a birder and I've been taking several of the bird courses offered through Bird Academy and have really enjoyed fine tuning my knowledge of birds and bird identification skills. I came across this course on Nature Journaling and was immediately excited about leaning new ways to use my sketch book, particularly in documenting birds I see out in nature. I like the idea of capturing more detailed observations about the birds I see and trying to record drawings of their behaviors in real-time. I would like to improve my bird drawing skills and incorporating this with writing more notes about what I am observing seems like a great combination. 2. Which ideas or approaches do you want to try? I'm excited and scared to try adding water color to my drawings. It has been many years since I dabbled in water color and I think it will be a fun challenge to incorporate this technique into capture more details about the birds I see.

I am writing from California, I was inspired to take this class to motivate me and my family to get outside (now that the smoke from wildfires have cleared).  I have always felt being in nature is like therapy for me and I need it more than ever.  I have always been on/off art projects nothing formal.  Nature journaling and sketching seems like a perfect blend of combining art with nature observation.  My 11 year old son is an amazing birder and takes great photos.  I plan to get us out birding weekly and use that time to journal.  I really like the journal that had a daily goal and a monthly goal for adding to the sketch book.  I plan to incorporate that into my sketching goals.

I took a course 6 years ago (I didn't realize so much time had passed until I pulled that notebook out to use for this course) that was an intensive field study along with learning the basics of using watercolor . I don't consider myself to be a skilled artist, I look for ways to be supported in my pursuit in a low stakes manner. I love being outside and often marvel at shapes and color, this course seemed like a welcome opportunity to commit time to improving skills with color and basic drawing skills. In this time of social distancing, I hope to see others progress and inspirations. I like the combined words and sketches, some with completed color, some not. Like others have mentioned, nature journaling is a welcomed counterpoint to my left brained career in medicine.

1.  I have always loved nature and being outside.  I grew up in the woods and on a bay, and as an only child there weren’t many kids to play with, so I spent a lot of time exploring by myself.  I kept track of what I saw here and there but nothing serious.  As an adult, I enjoy hiking and camping and I have tried to start a journal but have never kept it up.  Due to Covid, I have been reevaluating how I want to spend my time at home that is both creative and fulfilling and I have rediscovered nature journaling. 2.  I like the approaches that are about the learning first and the drawing second.  I think for me this will translate into the observations, questions, and connections as the majority of the page and the illustrations will support it.  I do like the use of watercolors as the medium, but that is intimidating for me at this moment so I am going to start with pencils/colored pencils.  I do look forward to learning watercolors in this series. 3.  For practice, I want to incorporate sketches from my most memorable photos from previous experiences in nature.  I have a few that have really strong memories associated with the photos, and I want to get the memories down on paper-and practice drawing the subject of the photo too.

1. I have loved nature ever since I was a little boy. My parents have always encouraged me to explore our natural world. We would go on hikes, climb mountains, go skiing, traveling, and I was lucky enough to have a grandmother that had a beach house in Stone Harbor, NJ. Exploring the beach, catching sand crabs, going fishing with my dad, and just being in the salt air every summer inspired me to go to college for Marine Biology. I currently have my bachelor’s degree in marine biology from Stockton University and work as a naturalist/marine biologist and first mate on a whale and dolphin watching boat. Both of my grandmothers have also enjoyed feeding the wild birds in their backyards and they passed this love of birdwatching on to me. My grandmother on my mom’s side of the family is currently 97 years old and continues to amaze me every day! She loves to paint, do crafts, play with our dog and still keeps feeding the birds. Her father was an artist and my great great uncle, Prosper Louis Senat was a famous French Painter with some of his artwork currently in a few museums. I feel like I have to have some type of artistic skills if it’s in the family right? Nature journaling to me, will be a way of connecting myself not only to nature but also to my ancestors in the same way that they expressed themselves through art ☺️ 2. I really liked the watercolor journaling. I definitely want to incorporate watercolors over top of pencil sketches like the girl in the final part of the video. I just really like the bold colors that pop out using watercolors. I would also like to try out some colored pencil sketches too as a personal challenge, since i’ve never done detailed sketching with colored pencils. 3. I’m also really into photography and my father has been a professional photographer for the last 35 years. I would like to maybe include a few pages in my journal that include some of my nature photography taken with my Canon 40d DSLR camera. I think it would be a neat way of learning how to sketch/paint using a still photograph, and then work my way up to sketching wild birds, whales, dolphins, sharks etc. that are moving ☺️🐧🦅🐋🦈🐳

Hi Everybody, my name is Leslie. I live in Texas.  I have been on again/off again nature journaling for the past five years, but mostly off! When I revisit a page, I think, why don't I do this more?  It is amazing how the nature journal can take you right back to that moment.  As I read other people's stories, I'm struck by the retirees' comments about living busy lives and not having time to create.  I am impressed by their new commitments to journal and also moved to make time to create at all stages of my life. I'm taking this class for three reasons:  1) get back on the horse 2) improve my watercolor skills and use watercolor in journaling which I have never done and 3) journal the everyday, but also record my hikes and travels (when this whole pandemic is over...)

Hello there!  I was inspired to begin nature journaling about four years ago.  Having just moved from Toronto, to Ottawa Ontario, I was exploring some new hobbies including photography, cross country skiing, and nature journalling!  I took an EdEx course called Illustrating Natural History, which was wonderful, however I'm even more excited about this course as it will include birds!  Like many of my fellow students here online, I've had a lifelong passion for birds, learning about them, watching them, and enjoy bird painting/arts in my spare time.  What excites me most about the journalling is that it really helps one develop an eye for details, and appreciate the natural world so much more deeply!  I also look forward to this process helping me document, and identify plants and birds on my nature walks. I want to ensure my journal has a real blend of science and art.  I want to include lots of descriptive writings, and I also want to have sketches that I can reflect on later that are accurate, and aesthetically pleasing.  I'd like to observe and record any behaviours, patterns, things I notice.  I was really impressed with the journal of the spider/bee and the memory the writer had of that moment in time. I started a new mixed journal at the beginning of the Pandemic, and in it I included some backyard birds.  I would sketch, and fill with colour pencil or watercolour, and then add some descriptions that I'd learned through some simple web searches.  It helped me learn basics of each bird.  I kept 1 bird per page, and my goal had been to draw all birds I saw.  Sadly, my journal was not meant for watercolour and so the pages wrinkled :(.   Happy journalling! Alisha

I’ve always admired other people’s journaling with drawing and watercolor but thought it was completely out of my reach. We’ll see. I see so many beautiful things outside around my house, at camp, at outdoor events, on walks...At the same time I feel more and more like a consumer in the age of “scanning”...walking with headphones on, scrolling through online media while sitting outside.  I want to become more focused again. I’m hesitant to pick a journaling style because I feel like I will be copying someone else a la Pinterest, so I will sees as I work along.

Even though I work as an ecologist, I end up spending most of my time on the computer and I feel disconnected from the naturalist I was in my younger years. I hope that nature journalling will help me reconnect with my study areas and taxa and also the surprising and beautiful natural world of the megacity I live in, during these hard times. The journals in the short video were incredible, I have no artistic experience whatsoever, so it seems incomprehensible to me that I would be able to produce anything similar, but I'm excited to learn. Some of the journalers' reflections really resonated with me, I like the way they used their journalling to observe and understand animal behavior, I thought the habit forming approach was very cool (daily/monthly journal) and I really enjoyed the idea of having a record of your experiences to share. I also think nature journalling seems like a really great way for older people to fight depression and reduce the risk of dementia, particularly during this pandemic, so I hope if I can get the hang of this, and when I'm able to travel overseas to safely visit my mum again, I can share this with her. The picture I've attached is to give you all a laugh and show just how baseline my baseline is: zero art experience, zero journalling experience, here are the last pictures I drew of plants and animals I'm currently working on for the whiteboard where my wife and I keep track of the papers we're writing. Let's see what happens!

I have recently become interested in birdwatching in this pandemic. We live in the country and have lots of room to roam and view all of the more inland birds of Monterey County. Sometimes I see a bird and want to capture it's features quickly so I don't forget what I have seen while on a walk. Sometimes I sit and watch for a length of time and thought about sketching. I have also thought about dabbling with water color. I already keep a birding journal and started some rough sketching. I found this course and it inspired me to look into this more and hope it becomes a habit which helps to ground me in nature and life. I like the journaling aspects along with visual representations, more random and practice for me as a novice. Some of the journals are overwhelming to view as a beginner. I was an art major in college but switched to psychology and education. I want to return to the artistic side and create in many different ways.

I am taking this course because I have recently been geeking out about fossils. I assigned my students to draw the six main types of fossils and some of my students' work was amazing.  I tried drawing some fossils that I found but my drawings were mediocre at best. The next thing I knew, this course showed up in my email. Bizarre right? Wish me luck.

I’ve been an amateur naturalist since I was a kid, loving to learn about the names and habits of all the plants and animals around me. When I was in college, I spent most weekends backpacking in the mountains and every week day I could steal hiking in the redwood forest. My kids remember one camping trip to Canada stopping at every volcano or new tree species along the way. About 5 years ago, I picked up colored pencil with the goal of being a portraitist of birds. It took me months to complete each drawing. I’ve never studied art, but I decided I wanted to learn to draw. In January, I got an iPad Pro with an Apple pencil, and it made me a lot bolder in my drawing experiments. I started a journal with sketches. When my mother was trapped aboard the Grand Princess cruise ship with the coronavirus (she’s fine), I switched to drawing quarantine comics. During the pandemic, I’ve been walking the boundaries of our property in the Santa Cruz Mountains, observing all of the changes at a new level of detail. I’ve watched juncos, spot-sided towhees, California towhees, Wilson’s warblers, Stellers jays, quail, crows, and a stealthy pair of sharp-shinned hawks raise their broods. The SCU Lightning complex fire boundary is a half mile from us. During our month of evacuation, all of the birds except the rufous hummingbirds and the chickadees left. Even the juncos, who have always been here in abundance, were gone. Over the past 6 weeks, the birds slowly came back. I’m 59 now. The Western forests that have been my deep love and my delight are under threat, along with every being who lives in them. I want to celebrate and record all of this life. The different journal styles gave me ideas and freed me from the idea that my nature journal needs to be any particular way. I can try different ideas and discover what works for me and what doesn’t. All of the examples of partial or unfinished drawings are a great reminder that my journal will be its own journey. The drawing is a zebra finch from my aviary.

 I've always loved to draw and write. In grade school I was in pretty high demand for my realistic pencil drawings of the Beatles, done with the help of my Magnijector, which allowed me to project their photos on my wall. After getting a degree in English lit (and birdwatching when I should have been in class), I went back to a trade school for graphic design so I could actually get a job. I was amazed at how awful my drawing was when I started, it was like I was back in 5th grade. But I was also amazed at how quickly I improved with practice and observation and good teachers. I've always had an opportunity to do art of one kind or another -- Shakespeare costume design, poster design, quilting, but my drawing is back to 5th grade again. I am fortunate enough to live in a town (Arden, Delaware) surrounded by woods, and I love my daily walks, taking photos with my iPhone, often just details, like the patterns in a mushroom (see the photo) or frogs disappearing into their background. I would most like to express the beauty of our Arden Woods. Many, many thanks to the journal makers in that great sampler video. They were all inspiring. I loved Shayna Muller's boxes and it was inspiring seeing Margaret Corbit's drawing evolve as she captured the hummingbirds' hover. I could almost feel the wind beneath their outstretched wings. The journal that spoke most to me was Holly Faulkner's. I love her organization by day or month and her obvious love of typography, along with her exquisite drawings, of course. But the graphic design — the combination of image and text — I found that approach inspiring. But enough writing, and on to drawing. Today I opened my sketchbook and headed for my favorite autumn mums, but stopped before I got there and sat down and drew a single leaf from the hardy begonia on my porch. I am looking forward to learning how to use watercolor, because that would be so much better for capturing the color and texture. Also, I should sharpen my pencils.

I think the finished journals are really cool, and they represent a very special time spent with one's self. I have always loved birds and my mother always had feeders and we would feed the birds in the winter months. I am an ESL teacher and try to teach my students about our state of Pennsylvania and, about 2 years ago, I realized they were not familiar with any of our birds. I designed a unit on Backyard birds and assigned each student a bird that we commonly see here. We spent days drawing them and writing short information about them. I was amazed at how much the students helped each other with their birds - the wings go more like this, or a second grader suddenly realizing the relationship of the beak and the eye and how they were located on the head. Drawing the birds was also very comforting and relaxing and the students spoke to one another and developed real friendships even though they were aged from Kindergarten through fifth grade. Students started coming into class telling me what birds they had seen after school or on the weekend and sharing what they looked like. We would look them up on this website and talk about them. I was so inspired by my students, that when I saw a class a few months ago I waited too long and the class was closed. When this one popped up, I jumped on it. I am really excited to start  drawing and journaling!

I have always enjoyed drawing but have gotten away from it. I do need to learn to work with color. I love nature and taking walks. I think this course will give me structure and an incentive to get back to drawing. I liked how people use the journaling to observe and remember what they saw.

The very first video gave me a sense of surprise and relief because it showed an easy way to give structure to a page. It showed boxes with sketches inside. I though, ‘Oh I can do that!’ Immediately my bit of anxiety at starting this new venture lowered. I also saw with surprise that the sketches were also breaking out of the boxes to provide some energy and movement on the page. As a very beginner who has limited experience with visual arts this gave me both a sense of the familiar and controllable (boxes) and the inspiration to break out of them. Another student entry before mine also mentioned how her environmental value to fill the page was important. This is true for me as well. I can see that the sketches can be small and leave room to write about what I was experiencing in the moment and about what I was noticing about my subject.The same student entry also mentioned how sketching plants might be easier at first and I that is a very good idea to start with. I also like her idea of sketching her garden and particular trees through the seasons. This is something I can also easily do. Another video mentioned using the basic geometric forms (as in the doves) and this is something else I’d like to focus on as I think it will be a good way to more efficiently capture the basic contours of my subject.

1. What inspired me to begin nature journaling?  I'm getting close to (if not already am) retirement age, and I've always been attracted to art and gardening.  I took a course at a local art institute - painting the flower as art.  The class was excellent, but as a beginner, taking a "non-beginner" class I floundered a lot.  So about 5 years later,  today, as a matter of fact, I happened to be out in my garden and took a look at a tree I have - a flying dragon.  I decided I wanted to draw or paint the tree - because I love the leaves in fall, and I love the bark which appears like a snake.  I sat down at my computer after breakfast and this course was listed as on-sale in my inbox...... and now I realize, I would really like to journal my garden through the seasons. 2.  I like all of the journals - being an environmentalist I prefer the pages that are packed full of drawings and notations -- this seems to be the best use of paper and space -- I also like when people preserve their errors, there is a lot of interest in the errors, and certainly the errors show progress in a "first time accuracy" kind of way - as opposed to just the final perfect picture.  I VERY much liked the "close ups" that one journalist used.  I also really enjoy colour -- and I loved the pencil sketches that emphasized the shapes and gestures - like the doves with the pronounced foreheads.  So certainly lots and lots of ideas from the journals that I viewed. 3.  The though of journaling is about 3 hours old to me at the moment -- so no, I have not thought it through much - with the exception that I would like to revisit the same plant(s) - throughout the various season rather than a one snapshot look at a plant.  I would like to also journal animals, but am currently not sure if my memory or speed will allow me to capture my subject -- perhaps a cell phone picture to assist me in the beginning...... but then on second thought, I feel like I would loose part of the experience by relying on technology.... so like others, I'll take my imperfections.