Inspiration to Keep a Nature & Wildlife Journal
Keeping a Nature Journal is a beautiful book, that has been revised for over 20 years, such is its popularity. Used by schools to art teachers, this features selections from the author’s own journals (which she’s kept for 40 years) plus prompts and step-by-step drawing techniques, to observe the natural world around you, even right outside your door.
Learn how to hone observation skills, and find lessons to draw plants, trees, birds, animals and landscapes.
Clare Walker Leslie is a wildlife artist, writer and educator who has been teaching people how to observe and draw nature for over 30 years. She lives in Massachusetts and Vermont, USA.
Use these journals with eco-friendly pencils or vegan watercolours.
KindKids: Let’s Draw Nature is a lovely book of 100 drawing lessons for creative children, which also helps them to foster a love for the natural world. And includes tips on how children can use their creative gifts, to make the world a kinder place. Use with wood-free recycled pencils.
The easy step-by-step lessons, teach children to draw everything from leaves to butterflies, and from owls to whales. All with fun facts along the way to inspire and educate.
The book offers tips for children to be more eco-friendly (from using both sides of the paper to save trees) to planting trees (read our post on pet-friendly gardens).
Mandy Ford is a licensed illustrator, lettering artist, graphic designer and teacher, who is passionate about using her creative gifts to make others feel cared for and loved. She lives in Indiana, USA, where she runs on hope and coffee (sometimes in reverse order).
A Weekly Backyard Nature Journal
Leaf, Cloud, Crow is an illustrated journal to guide observations of nature in gardens and yards, city parks and vacant lots, or even the sky, enhanced by inspiring prompts from the author.
What do the bare branches of winter allow you to see? How does summer’s abundance provide for different wild animals, and can you find abundance in your own life?
What changes have you noticed in natural habitats near you – not just from month to month, but from year to year?
Grow more attuned to all the ‘radiant things bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world’.
A howling love letter to the world, the story of what we’ve lost and what we can save and the abundance of wonder in our own backyard.
Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee (USA).
Secrets from a Devon Wood
Secrets of a Devon Wood is a treat for the senses, with exact replicas of illustrations that the artist makes of discoveries she finds in the wood behind her Devon home.
Jo Brown began keeping her nature diary because ‘thing of such magnitude deserve respect and understanding, and deserve to be remembered’.
In enchanting and minute detail, she zooms in on a bog beacon mushroom, a buff-tailed bumblebee or a native bluebell. And notes facts on physiology and life history.
This book is a hymn to the beauty of the natural world, and a quiet call to arms for all of us to acknowledge and preserve it. A book that will stay with you.
These beautifully illustrated notes are not polished essays, but real-time records to capture the first-hand wonder that the author feels when spotting beetles, fungi or ferns, in her own patch of woodland.
These drawings are straight from Jo’s personal sketchbook. Plants, feathers, and insects sit alongside handwritten notes. There is as much detail on a simple leaf, as a fox or owl.
The idea is to encourage anyone with a notebook to slow down, and look at the ground beneath their feet, to discover nature on the doorstep.
You’ll also learn a lot. Latin names beside common ones. And you’ll learn when certain species bloom. Learning about mosses to wildlife feels like a gentle chat, not a lecture.
Discover how one wood changes with the seasons, as Jo visits the same patch day after day, spotting small shifts that many people miss.
Brown’s work celebrates local nature rather than far-flung destinations. She shows Devon’s woodlands as places full of hidden drama and beauty.
This focus speaks to anyone in England who wants to connect with their own local patch, no matter how ordinary it seems at first glance. The result: more people feel encouraged to protect and appreciate neighbourhood wild spaces.
Readers of all ages see how to start their own journals—even without fancy art supplies or years of training.
Jo Brown is a professional illustrator from Devon, who graduated from Falmouth College of Arts with a BA Honours in Illustration. She works from her home studio to illustrate the natural world, working mainly with pen and ink.
An Artist’s Year of Field, Forest & Coast
From Field & Forest offers an artist’s year in paint and pen, a book of flora and fauna from the fields and forests surrounding the artist’s home. In this mindful art journal, Anna celebrates the changing of the seasons, the blossoming of flowers and the ripening of fruit.
Working in watercolour, her illustrations are reproduced in beautiful detail and accompanied by musings and observations of the natural world.
Whether drawing wasps feasting on apples (fallen from the orchard) or capturing the cerulean blue of a winter sky, you are sure to be inspired.
Also read From Coast & Cove, which gives more inspiration as Anna and her family move from East Sussex to the Devon seaside.
Now she finds inspiration from the ebb and flow of the tide through the year, the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore and creatures spotted in the air, on land and in rockpools.
From the haunting cry of the curlew (heard while kayaking along the River Dart) and the iridescent scales and pointed teeth of a hake, to the mussel shells discarded by an oystercatcher and the kelp, wrack and eelgrass strewn along the beach.
Anna Koska is a freelance illustrator who specialises in fruit, vegetables and the natural world. She lives on the Devon coast, having spent many years in Sussex. She forest-runs and cycles, and is fervent in her efforts to supply the family with homemade everything
