Sketching and Nature

I have an ambivalent relationship with the artistic side of "nature journaling". It's become clear to me that the act of sketching something found in the natural world makes a significant difference in how closely you look at it and how well you remember it. So I find it extremely helpful. However, much of what is called nature journaling that you may encounter online shows these impressively designed and presented drawings, paintings, and lettering that it feels like some kind of sacrilege to sully my notebook with my own feeble attempts. There are terrific tutorials online from many artists (John Muir Laws and Jed Dunkerley's are my current favorites) but sometimes I feel more distracted by the need to make some kind of art and realize I'm following their guides but not looking at the actual specimen. Which is fine for learning technique but difficult to translate into my own work sometimes. And let's not even discuss the issues of attempting to draw or paint in the field!

All that said, I am sorry that the Introduction to the Natural World course doesn't have at least some small section on keeping a naturalist's journal, sketches or not. I can see why - there really isn't a perfect option for it. We are encouraged to use apps to identify and learn about plants and animals (and it is much handier than carrying multiple hard guides). Some of them even keep a running life-list for you. The handiest ones use AI and crowd-sourcing to help ID and keep a list, iNat being the top in this area. As I've started posting more observations I struggle to find people to help ID some of the less obvious organisms. But a trick I've found is to post something wrong - at first I was just trying to get the correct family or genus, but I've found if you post a species as a guess you are more likely to get someone who is excited to correct you, heh. Though I worry about possibly contributing incorrect info that way.

I wish there was a good way to add sketches to the journal. I suppose one could add sketches as, or to, observations, but I'm not sure how well that would go over. I've been taking a shot at drawing some of these garden buddies over the last couple of days.

Publicado el 20 de junio de 2023 a las 10:12 PM por