About 18 months ago, after a few decades of doing almost no art at all, I drew a leaf and some gumnuts I’d found on a walk with my dog, earlier that day. That seemingly insignificant moment marked my return to drawing, and eventually the start of a perpetual nature journal to record botanical pieces that caught my eye, throughout the year.
A perpetual journal is one that you add to year after year, so that the dated pages become a collection of the things you’ve seen at the same calendar time, over many seasons and years. My journal is divided into weekly double-page spreads (Because I couldn’t find one book with enough pages, I have two: one covering January to June and the other June to December). There’s no pressure to make an entry every day or week (I certainly don’t always manage it!), it’s simply a creative way to record change, connections and observations over the years.
I had barely drawn at all since I was a teenager so I decided to develop my skills with the things I could observe most easily - Australian native flora in nearby bushland and things in my garden. Over time, my perpetual nature journal has become not only a personal observation of local plants but the catalyst for reigniting my creative expression. It’s also become a practical exercise in mindful observation.
I’ve had a daily meditation practice for many years, much longer than I’ve been nature journaling. I quickly noticed that the way I experienced and recorded the natural world drew on elements from my meditation and mindfulness practices.
Mindfulness is often described as ‘being in the moment’, but it is more than that. It’s about making a deliberate choice to pay attention to your immediate experience (most easily done by noticing what we can observe with our senses) and to do so in a particular way, that is, without judgment and with compassionate, open-minded curiosity. Among other things, the practice helps train our attention and observational skills. It deepens our connection to what’s around us by encouraging us to suspend our assumptions and be open to noticing things exactly as they are.
Each nature journal is unique. All are creative expressions of our personal interests and ways of seeing the natural world. We all pay attention to different things in different ways and there is a huge variety in what we are interested in putting on our pages, but the contents have something in addition to nature in common: they are all the results of our sensory observations. Whether we are sketching outdoors, working from a photo or memory (or a combination of all these things), our journals are full of our records of where we have placed our mindful attention. They reflect what we have noticed about how something looks/moves, feels, smells, tastes and/or sounds.
My journal reveals my interest in textured botanical things: pods, seeds, dried leaves, bark and the fascinating flowers of the Australian banksias and grevilleas. I have a small sketchbook, which I take with me on walks. Later, I can draw a more detailed piece in my perpetual journal, working from a sketch and photo, or from a sample I’ve collected.
I don’t have formal art training so my ‘technique’ is simply close observation. A lot of the time I wasn’t sure how to draw my subject - especially the banksia pods and flowers, which I love so much - so I started from the observation that everything is line, light and shadow. I looked at the directions of lines and shapes, what overlapped and where the variations of light and dark revealed outline and depth. It was six months before I had the confidence to tackle my first banksia pod and it still gives me pleasure to see how my skills grew, by looking carefully and drawing regularly.
I also did most of my early drawing in ink pen, for the simple reason that I wouldn’t be able to erase anything. Prior to this, my teenage drawing experience had been almost exclusively in graphite. I decided, however, that using a pen would be the quickest way to exercise my ‘drawing eye’ because I would be compelled to REALLY pay attention knowing there would be a permanent record in my journal of every pen mark! Later, I experimented with coloured pencils and watercolour, and I’m continuing to learn as I go.
There is another helpful approach to drawing called ‘beginner’s mind’, which also comes from my meditation practices. It’s a way of looking at things with ‘fresh–eyes’, as if you are seeing or experiencing it for the first time. This attitude allows the mental space for new information to come through that you might otherwise have overlooked. As expressed by the Zen master Suzuki Roshi: “In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
So instead of knowing you are looking at a ‘leaf’, try thinking of it as just a collection of colours, held within a shape. What can you see? It’s amazing the additional details you start to notice. You might become aware of tiny hairs on a flower stem that you thought was smooth or see tones of blue and green (and more!) in a tree’s bark which, at first glance, appeared to be just shades of greys and brown.
Recently, while doing a coloured pencil drawing of a banksia flower I noticed that amongst the obvious browns and orange- yellows were unexpected flashes of a flesh- pink tone. Just adding dashes of that colour brought more depth to my drawing.
So, my nature journal has become as much an exploration (and experiment!) of how I can show what I see as it is a record of what I see.
Our natural world is an amazing treasure of shape, colour, texture, taste, scent, and sound. It is also a living, breathing, seasonally and climactically evolving landscape. As I draw, and journal, I am continually reminded that paying close attention to the small things is a pathway for connection to the bigger world around us.
You can find more of Pauline’s work on Instagram @wild.pencils.