Well, I decided to consider teaching a local class in nature journaling and possibly creating a video course online (maybe even putting some of it up on You Tube or something like that. Who knows. the point is, I decided to try the theory out by walking through the steps each time I do some nature drawing with my children.
I used to just tell them to draw what they see...that is the essence of nature journaling, since it is based on observation. However, that is a little bit vague. some kids do great with it and some not so great. ;) The other common way is the method of drawing the animal/flower "as it is supposed to be"...not looking at what you are drawing but just drawing it following the steps in some drawing book....but the point of this exercise was to observe and take note of what we were drawing. I have been trying to develop some method to help kids observe things in nature, learn where to start a drawing (the hardest part!), and learn how to create a drawing based on what we are looking at, and in a way that a child can understand.
The other reason of working through a formal class idea with my own kids was not only to work through the hows, but also the how longs. LOL (it seems we draw about 20 minutes to 45 minutes...whereas in the art class we take with Don West, we are drawing for 3 hours and it doesn't seem long enough!!).
Our two subjects this week were the bulbs our dog dug up (argh!) and the daffodils that I planted in with my garlic in the back garden. We had a blast.
These journal entries were both made using a watercolor paper sketchbook, with sharpie markers, Prismacolor Grey Scale Markers for shading, and some generic water color pencils for the shading. They were first sketched out using a 4H Graphite Pencil.
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