More Nature Journaling

If you are visiting a national park this summer, why not try some of these nature journal ideas.

Last spring I sent some specific ways to make entries in a Nature Journal. Our family has been using those ideas regularly. We tried the leaf exercise and the following warm up ideas. I put a pumpkin in the center of the living room before we went outside to journal. We made drew several of these warm up sketches.

1. Blind Contour - Good to try when you first see an object, and to ge tyour hand onto the paper...Without looking at your paper at all, keeping your eyes only on your object, "trace" in a continuous line across your paper everything you see. Don't look, lift your pencil, or stop until you have drawn all lines, outlines, markings, bristles, veins, eyes, feathers and so on. . . Don't peek at your paper. Complete in 1-2 minutes.

2. Modified Contour - Draw the same form that you made the blind contour, allowing yourself to look at the paper, but be sure you do not lift your pencil off the paper. Draw with one continuous unwinding line, as before. Go slowly & stop only when you feel you have fully read your object. Complete in 1-2 minutes.

3. Quick gesture Sketch - Useful for field artists because much of what we draw moves quickly! Looking at your paper & the object at the same tim, lifting your pencil as eneded, now scribble down the whole form as fast as you can for 5 seconds; then try doing it in 10 seconds, finally take 15 seconds to get your sketch down. Try to get the major sense of th form by looking hard and drawing the large, identifyiable shapes. Exampe: bird comes to a feeder & keeps returning to same posture.

More warm up activities are given in Keeping a Nature Journal. This is one of my favorite resource for making entries into our nature journal. (Yes, I said "our journal". I keep a journal, too.) Another terrific source is Nature Studies the Easy Way. Scroll down this page to find this title.

Kerry