Rachel

I am so excited to take this course! I’m really looking forward to learning more about water color techniques, enhancing my life drawing skills, and honing my observational skills. I’ve always thought that if I had (or have) it to do all over again, I’d be a field biologist. Counting some organism all day and making note of their behaviors and surrounding habitat... that sounds like so much fun to me... I’m also looking forward to making this a regular practice that I can do with my daughters; I can’t wait to go out with them with our sketchbooks and kits and sale what they observe in their world. I want them to have the skills and capacity to appreciate the natural world around them in a deep and purposeful way. They will inevitably think this is ridiculous and want to go build a fort and a zipline with their father, I’m sure. I really like the journals with written observations, date and location; the bio major in me totally geeks out on stuff like that, and I want my journaling process to be about learning about what’s around here in the Pacific Northwest, since it’s not where I grew up and there’s a lot here I’m only moderately familiar with! I also like the idea mentioned in someone’s post about taking a physical sample of the environment and inserting it into the sketchbook later; the only journal I’ve ever kept up with successfully has been a travel journal when I was in college and traveled around Tasmania, with random things glued in from the places I visited and quick sketches of something that might have caught my eye.