Do you put yourself in your journal?

I noticed with the Wild Wonder 2024 entries shared on the FaceBook page The Nature Journal Club at least five attendants drew the workshop hosts in their journal entries. One I interacted with mentioned that the person became a subject to study and draw by being available on the online meeting platform for as long as the talk took. In other words the viewer wanted to incorporate a portrait as part of their learning experience, where the speaker became the observed subject.

My own attempt at sketching Cati Vawda in Newlands Forest where she had been telling the group about nature journaling as an activity and how we could go about getting the most of the experience.

Your journal is your personal record of your observations in place in time and landscape. There are no rules to exclude people. Paula Peeters, an eminent Australian nature journaler, says,

“Mine ranges from the personal to the scientific, from records of facts and realistic images to the imagined beasts, scenes, and stories."

I listened to the Nature Journal Educators Forum episode Putting ourselves in our nature journals on the John Muir Laws YouTube channel and noted the following on their learnings:

• Putting yourself into your journal entry allows you to use yourself to narrate what you were seeing, or adding a speech bubble to record your observation or thoughts.

• Using yourself in your entry might be used to give a sense of scale in comparison without using a ruler or measurements. Jack Muir Laws uses one's own biometrics to measure with - how long is your finger, length of your footstep, how high are you hips to describe hip high growth?

• Reactions or feelings can be recorded when you make use of emoticons. One attendant mentioned when working with children, she encourages the children to record their emotion when starting their journal entry and then again at the end of the session to mark any changes.

• You could use yourself as a geographical reference to show the placement in a landscape in relation with whereabouts.

• Recording the closest people when nature journaling in a place.

• Recording part of ourselves, i.e. putting your field into the field of vision, instead of the whole self. One educator mentioned she would represent herself with just her hat.

• You could write down words to represent thoughts (without the speech bubble) instead of the usual prompts or questions.

• One attendant showed how she used stick figures or reduced the human figure to a very tiny scale to avoid making the person too detailed and by that putting pressure on herself.

• You could show direction - for the source of a noise, flight of a bird - by directing an emoticon's feature in that direction.

Some collected examples:

Some nature journaling from Siziwe Hlongwa (WESSA KZN Youth Chair) pointing at whales they spotted and showing the camaraderie shared on the boat.

At the Newlands Forest outing I drew Liling Yan who was closest to me where I had made myself comfortable.

Do you add people in your journal entries?

Has the thought not occurred or appealed to you?