On Saturday I joined the online Melbourne Nature Journal Club, run by Amy Kirkbright.

I sketch daily in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbooks and sketch a wide variety of subjects: urban sketching, objects, and nature. Here are some of my nature sketches.

I usually like to include context in my pages. I am curious about what I am drawing I always make notes on the page. I follow a lot of artists on facebook, instagram and blogs and have realised that I am enjoying some of the journalling styles of the nature sketchers. I feel as though my nature sketches don’t have that extra narrative.

I recently discovered the facebook group The Nature Journal Club. “The Nature Journal Club is a diverse community of artists and naturalists, of all levels, who meet together to connect to nature through art. Founded by artist, educator, and author John Muir Laws, our group is centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it is open to anyone around the world with a passion for exploring nature with a journal”.

In “normal times” I take Nature Sketching with Watercolour Pencil Classes (Melbourne residents are in lockdown) . My classes are about using watercolour pencils (which I love) and observation of nature. I now want to move my observations and notetaking up a bit, but not move onto full-on natural history scientific illustration, AND I still want to be an urban sketcher and draw interesting objects. It has been interesting to see the diverse range nature journaling in the Natural Journal Club, and the realisation that I do not need to become too scientific.

I first discovered two Australians, Bethan Burton, https://www.journalingwithnature.com/podcast, who has interviewed nine nature journalers (including a sketching friend Jules Woolford https://www.drawnintonature.com/) and their wide variety of ages, places, and styles.

and then Amy Kirkbright https://www.amydiana.co/ is based in Melbourne and was running a online workshop (in lockdown Melbourne) which I signed up for .

Here are the results of the two-hour Workshop on Saturday. Amy spent time explaining her approach and concepts and things for us to think about. I took a page of Workshop notes. We then went outside our doors for 45 minutes and returned to our screens to share. That was interesting and fun. Here are my sketches and notes.

I now have a series of prompts to work with to add more information to the page. Sometimes these will be questions that may not have answers. Other questions I will look up online after the event.

I also recently discovered Open Trees.org ” the world’s largest database of municipal street and park trees, produced by harvesting open data from dozens of different sources”

Melbourne Urban Forest Visual The City of Melbourne maintains more than 70,000 trees. Individual tree data for City of Melbourne trees is presented on the map . Pan and Zoom into different areas of Melbourne, click on tree symbols to reveal details, and select between different locations and filters.