A week ago I taught a one-day workshop, Introduction to Nature Journaling for Calligraphers. Sponsored by the Olympia, WA "Nib N'Inks" calligraphy guild, the goal for the day was to focus on seeing, sketching, labeling, and designing nature journal pages. The eleven students were exceptionally focused, producing both warm-up studies in ink, and finished ink and watercolor images on art grade paper. The day went by quickly, allowing little time to photograph, but here are some of the colorful specimen pages, followed by the landscape pages done en plein air (outside).

The assignment behind these ink and watercolor images was to draw both items, starting first with pen for the daffodil, then add paint from light to darker values. For the radish, I demonstrated how to loosely paint the color, then lightly add pen lines to generally define the forms.

These four pages above and below ( each 6"x10") particularly illustrate the individual way of seeing that we each experience. Going from drawing a daffodil and a radish to a complex arrangement of deciduous trees and conifers, outside, is a huge leap.

The students launched into this with no mention of intimidation. Beginning with rectangles in pencil, they began this exercise by laying down a watercolor wash in one of the rectangles. That dried prior to our outdoor sketching session. Back in the classroom, they drew wet-into-wet, from memory, in another of the rectangles. I love the variety of feeling each little tree portrait carries in this series. Nice work, participants!

(I'm sorry not to be able to label each piece with the artist's name. I know who did a few of these, but not all of them.)