Monday is the last day I will be posting any logbooks as I’m “closing the shop” until the New Year, from Tuesday 21st December until January 4th. It has been such an incredible year for me–with a very steep learning curve!–so I am looking forward to some quiet reflection and gentle planning over the holiday period, as well as a LOT of sketching and catching up with simply creating art for pleasure.
I would like to thank everyone who has followed, liked, purchased and encouraged me with my logbooks. It was quite a leap of faith but I am thrilled with how they have both turned out, and been taken up by such a diverse range of people and outlets.
I want to start up my Nature Notebook again in January as I have been really inspired by the beautiful drawings and paintings by some very talented artists, and I need to get some practise in as I am running a field sketching course with the South Downs Wildlife group on Sunday May 15th and I am hoping that some folk attending that will want to use their skills for creating a visual record of the nature around them.
This, to me, is the perfect extension to the logbooks: they are for taking out and about and noticing what is there and when, but to bring those notes and sketches back to create a diary or journal entry really enhances an appreciation of what has been seen, and allows any latent or nascent artistic skills to develop organically. Recording nature is such a diminishing skill and I do really feel that making art from both our learned knowledge and new experiences cements that information so much more clearly, and it is a wonderful thing to keep as an archive – even more so now as the biodiversity crisis grips ever more tightly.
So, grab a sketchbook, and some pens, pencils and paints and join me next year for a journalling journey. I will be putting up my field sketching tips in future blogposts, so do subscribe for updates.
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