Floating Thing

1. What inspired you to begin nature journaling? My interest is birds.  Journaling is less expensive than bird photography and recording bird song.  The equipment for those endeavors can mount into the thousands of dollars.  It's essentially an arms race of equipment.  Plus all that equipment is heavy to lug around.  I wanted to be agile, lightweight, and be able to move quickly to find birds and plants of interest. While a photograph can capture more detail in an instant, I think there is merit in taking the time to observe and capture your impressions on paper.  This imprints the details in your mind, just as taking notes in class forces you to be mindful, thoughtful, and attentive. I'm definitely not an artist.  I hope I can develop my skills to somewhat capture what I see.  Drawing and journaling also seem like a more organic, human way of documenting experience than using engineered products like cameras, lenses, sound recorders, and microphones.  There is charm in seeing the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci.  Learning about nature journals lets me think that I can follow in the steps of Lewis and Clark and capture the nature that I see. 2. Now that you’ve heard from several other journalers about their processes, and had a peek at their journals, which ideas or approaches do you want to try? I like the way the capture the essence of what they’re drawing: the graceful curve of a fern leaf, the texture of a pine cone, the subtle gradations of color, the accurate silhouette of a landscape, deconstructing the form of a bird into overlapping ovals and circles. I like the idea of drawing a picture – first, as a mnemonic to affix the essential and defining characteristics of a bird or plant, and second, as a charming record of my memories. I definitely want to annotate my drawings with details I notice, questions that come to mind, topics for further study, and perhaps hypotheses about why things are the way they are. 3. Do you have a different journaling idea, not mentioned here, that you’d like to share? Journaling is a personal creative endeavor.  Each person will develop a style and structure of their own.