Being imperfect and messy

One of the things nature teaches me is that its okay to be imperfect and messy.

It’s taken me a long time to get here with my drawings in my nature journals.

For the first 20 years of nature journaling I was plagued my my inner critic and never really felt good about my drawings— so I didn’t draw much. And when I did draw they felt constrained, forced, impersonal, and I was a harsh judge. During that time I used mostly words and taped in photographs.

But now the past several years I’ve gathered various ways to make drawing easeful and fun. (It won’t take you that long- I’ll show you how!)

So, yesterday when I did some nature journaling I remembered what my drawing used to feel like, and how it’s so much easier, and freer now. I wanted to share this with you.

You never know when nature might capture your attention so I always have my nature journal with me.

I went to local cafe for a meeting, and when I walked to this table I saw the leaves scattered on the ground.

Liquidambar, or sweet gum is one of my favorites for fall color. They were loudly beckoning me!

I knelt down, and gathered a handful of various colors. I felt such joy and freedom like the way a child gathers nature treasures— “ooh this one, and now this one, and now that one” it’s such joy to do so!!

I love to line up fall leaves in a gradient or color order, and marvel at the beauty! Some trees have browns and oranges but this one was butter yellow and red apple red.

Here’s what I did in my journal.

I started with a small sketch of the tree- to show context of the place.

Contour drawings are my go-to way to sketch! It’s one of the things that shifted my journaling toward easeful drawing.

I did contour drawings of a few leaves - all the while hearing my inner critic judge how badly the leaves were being drawn 😂 and just kept going.

I now KNOW I’m not drawing for perfection so I tune out that unhelpful voice. The more I kept doing my loose sketching the quieter the inner critical voice became.

Just like I tell my students, I’m drawing to SEE and going for perfectly imperfect drawings….

I can feel the slight tension inside, and I keep drawing to see…. drawing to see…you could repeat this like a mantra going on in your head to replace the unhelpful words, like "this doesn't look like a tree", "you got the shape all wrong", "its not right".

Changing my perspective is helpful too.

I'm drawing to see rather than drawing a pretty picture.

With watercolor, I approach the same way.

It’s not meant to be perfectionistic.

I don’t worry about perfect color matching— I can always add words to describe if the color is off…. And I allow the paint to be a bit messy to match the informal loose pen lines.

If I want to focus on more accurate detail, I can always zoom in and do a small detail of the leaf margin or vein pattern, but today I loved the color gradient--that's what spoke to me.

I’m allowing nature to move through me, and I express what I feel and see…

Sometimes it can be hard to break away from realism in nature journaling. I sometimes print a photo if the exact details were important.

I encourage you think about why you are drawing and allow yourself to experiment with being imperfect and messy— because…

nature is imperfect and messy…

And life is imperfect and messy.

AND recognize that its all perfectly imperfect!

When you embrace that you can also see it’s full of wonder and joy and excitement and discovery- if you choose it.

I choose to focus on being imperfectly imperfect in my journaling as well as in other things— instead of unconsciously following how I’ve been conditioned my family, school, and societal expectations to always be serious, proper, realistic, accurate…..(there is a time for this, but not all the time).

I need and crave more joy, playfulness, creativity, fluidity, expressiveness, laughter, marvel, awe, and gratitude in my life.

When I choose this, I’m calmer, kinder, more compassionate with me and others…

How do you choose to be in your nature journaling?

What can you express on your page imperfectly and messily?

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments!

Do you want to practice this way of approaching nature journaling?

Come join me online! Check out my calendar here.