Hello!
It’s great to have you here. Welcome to the Outdoor Sketchbook Collective - a blog run by me, Orla 👋 . Here on substack I share and document my love for creativity and nature, through words, art, photos and video.
To celebrate the Spring Equinox tomorrow (20th march 2024), I thought it’d be the perfect moment to bring around our Spring drawing challenge. I’ve been sharing quarterly seasonal drawing prompts here on Substack, which started in autumn 2023. This is a creative journalling exercise I use to tune in to myself, where I am, and my materials and colours.
photo credit to Euan Robertson who also runs a great substack!
What are these seasonal drawing prompts for?
The seasonal drawing prompts are invitations to help loosen up, play, and have fun working outside, or to be inspired by the outside. This practice of drawing from nature is as much about making time to tune in to how you feel and where you are, as the process or creation of drawing itself. It is definitely not about making pressure or ‘good’ art - I hope the seasonal prompts are invitations to encourage you to have fun and increase the muscle and habit of making, expressing, and finding a little more nature in your everyday - whatever that looks like for you. They are not really prescriptive to a specific season and can be done any time, so if you’d like to try the other ideas out, you’ll find the autumn here and winter here.
These prompts are also great working in response to memories of places, which I often do when I can’t be outside in the places I love most.
Spring drawing prompt
As we ease out of winter and the days get longer and lighter, it becomes more comfortable to work, and just be, outside. This seasonal prompt is all about using colours and marks together, to explore emotion. It’s an exercise I use as part of my journalling and sketchbook practice, and it’s great for two things:
Broadening your understanding, associations and relationships with colours and marks
Tuning in to environments and how they make you feel, or as a check-in with how you are feeling in general.
What you’ll need
Paper - I like to do this in a sketchbook, but work on any surface you like.
Materials - I love to use mixed materials for this to reflect various emotions and experiences. I’d suggest using two or three of your favourite materials. At the moment mine are watercolour, ink and oil pastel for working on the move.
Check out my go-to list for lightweight low-fuss outdoor drawing materials here.
Steps
Take a minute to sit or stand still, in quiet. Give yourself some space to tune in to where you are, and how you are feeling. If it feels good, you might want to do a little written journalling now to clarify some thoughts, worries or observations - of what you see, hear, think or feel.
How are you feeling in that moment? What emotion are you feeling? You might want to concentrate on how the environment you’re in is making you feel. It might also be feelings from something that’s been on your mind, something that happened this week. Think about this feeling: if it could be a colour, what colour would it be?
Fill your page with this colour as a background, or if you don’t have this colour available, note down what it is. You might want to think about how you fill this page edge to edge: is it very textural, a thin wash of paint, lots of little marks?
I picked this green, which I associate with openness & feeling quietly alive
On top of this colourful page, we’re going to try out some drawing or mark making in response to this feeling. This doesn’t need to look like anything visually representative: We’re looking to explore lines and textures and shapes that connect in with how we feel. For this, we might want to think about what material we use, if it’s thick or transparent, if it’s light or dark, if we apply it heavily or softly, quickly or slowly to the page. You can use one material and colour, or many - whatever best reflects how you’re feeling in the moment. There really is no right or wrong with this, so play, experiment, and see what arises!
If this feels a bit too open ended, ease yourself in by drawing what you can see around you on top of the colour - maybe the view in front of you, or some details from the landscape like leave textures or bark.Some marks that emerged, which have ended up looking a little like an internal landscape
If you’d like to learn more about mark making and it’s potentials in self expression, I have a free video tutorial which you can watch here, and there are many more tutorials and resources over on my Patreon which dive deeper into nature connection in art making.
This exercise is a practice I have done over years, and it’s really helped me understand my own connections to mark, materials and colour naturally over time. It’s also been a great grounding exercise when life gets a little tougher, so if you’re in need of a little headspace I hope it brings some solace 🌿
See you outside,
Thanks for the mention Orla. Always love seeing your work pop into my inbox