Nature Journaling – Observing the Season

How often do you stop to really take a look at the details of nature? How often do you ask yourself questions about how you would describe it?

Creative wellbeing organisation, Art Branches, showed us how to start our own nature journal at the Brecks Outdoor Festival with a masterclass in observation and expression.

We arrived at West Stow Country Park in glorious sunshine and were each handed sketchbooks and pens. The aim of this workshop was to create a response to seasonal details we saw in our sketchbooks. We looked at examples of sketchbooks created by others, some scientifically accurate in their depiction of plants, some purely abstract responses to the natural world and some a blend of the two: drawings of the details of plants and creatures with extracts of poetry or quotes about the natural world. We talked about how precious it is to spend time noticing the changes of the season, and the cycles of growth and decay in our local area and what a valuable resource records can be in the future.

With minds whirling with possibilities, we set off down to the river.

It wasn’t long before we found a very noticeable seasonal detail: a bulky green bush laden with dark berries.

Prunus Spinosa – Blackthorn – Sloes

There, perched on stools, we each chose a small part of the bush and began to try to draw it. We were encouraged to notice the details. How the leaves grew in triplets, sprouting out of hard brown buds, and how each one had finely serrated edges. We talked about how you could use sloes (in gin mainly!) and looked at the varying shades of the berries. We thought about how we would describe the blues we saw in that bitter fruit:

Midnight – Prussian – Stormcloud – Steel 

After a while, with fresh ink on the pages of our new books, we set off again to see what else we could find. Down by the river there were many details: the big quilted leaves of comfrey, the narrow fluttering willow and the hairy spearheads of nettles. There were snails too, pale yellow and spiralled with tortoiseshell stripes, spiders and butterflies and dragonflies. The late summer sun still picked out a few gem-like flowers: the fluffy lilac watermint, bindweed trumpets and even some tiny forget-me-nots that still lingered on the riverbank.

With some gentle guidance from the Art Branches team, we each set about adding drawings to our pages until, little by little, we had captured a piece of late summer in ink.

On the way back up to where we started, we even stopped to draw a little piece of the old Pump House – turning our hands to bricks and gutters and arched windows, and the way the structure was being slowly reclaimed by nature with nettles growing against glass, and moss and ivy creeping across the walls.

Some people in our group were extremely talented artists, whether they knew it or not. Some were returning to an old hobby after many years of life getting in the way. Some people, like me, were complete novices. I find it frustrating, sometimes, not being able to capture what I can see on the page because I’m not skilled enough. But that wasn’t the point of this exercise – no-one was judging how well we had drawn anything – it was simply about noticing the natural world and capturing the details we had seen in any way we chose.

At the end of the day, we all went home with newly started sketchbooks, a new perspective on the wildlife around us, and a new way of slowing down and seeing the world.