Keeping a nature journal can not just hone creative skills, but creates a stronger connection to the natural world. Use recycled pencils & recycled art paper. Or for paints, biodegradable watercolours & vegan brushes.
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.
a gorgeous inspiring Devon nature journal
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.
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 flora, fauna & coasts
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 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 natual 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.
the creative process of an artist & naturalist
Drawing Nature: The Creative Process of an Artist is a book by acclaimed nature artist Linda Miller Feltner who guides readers from field sketches to finished art, showing how science and close observation of nature can be integrated into art to create meaningful images. With chapters that flow from drawing basics to more advanced methods, this beautifully illustrated book is like a look inside the artist’s sketchbooks, to discover her secrets.
Linda Feltner is an award-winning nature artist and educator who combines artistic design with scientific accurancy. She has taught at University of Washington Scientific Illustration Certification Program, and currently teaches for the Art Institute of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
She is a member of the Artists For Conservation, Society of Animal Artists, and Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. She lives in the Sky Islands (a range of isolated mountains bordering northern Mexico and southeastern Arizona), providing awe-inspiring biodiversity right outside her studio window.
letters on observing the natural world
Nature on the Doorstep is a calming and beautifully written book, revealing the simple pleasures of paying attention to the natural world in one’s own backyard, over the course of a year. In weekly letters, the author shares the joys and curiosities of an ordinary patch of green in upstate New York, cultivated through the art of ‘strategic neglect’ – in other worlds, leaving things be instead of ‘trying to always help’.
From the first flowers of spring to cardinals singing in the winter, the author shows the magic of welcoming unexpected plant and animal life into one’s life. A paean to the richness we find when we stop to look and let be, the book celebrates the role that humble backyards have to play in both conservation efforts, and an expanded appreciation of the living world.
Angela E Douglas is a British entomologist who is Professor of Insect Physiology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York State.
