My new nature journaling project, to journal every day for a year, has been going amazingly well. I have only missed one day in the last month-and-a-half since I began. And I've cut way back on posts of the "It's 10 p.m. and I haven't even been outside except to walk to my car" variety. The project seems to be succeeding so far, in pushing me out into nature more than I might on a regular basis and in encouraging me to pay attention while I'm there.
But now...NOW I can take pictures, upload them to my computer, arrange them in a little collage and print them out all in one day. Many days, the pictures have saved me. When I don't have much to add to an entry, I place a few photos and captions.
Other times, I incorporate the photos with writing and/or drawing, often planning ahead, leaving little 2x3 inch gaps between my words for later photo additions.
I LOVE making these little photo collages, that tell a little story about one day or afternoon. I'm about three years behind on uploading photos to Snapfish and making them into albums, so my nature journal has become my only printed record of family photography and I find myself paging through it just to look at the pictures. I especially love how it chronicles my family and my time in nature together, which is the theme and goal of my current nature journaling project.
How do you incorporate your photography into your other creative pursuits?
Previous Nature Journaling posts:
See also Nature Journaling as Meditation for more on starting a nature journal.
Does it make your journal too thick to close correctly when you add pictures? Or do you have some secret of adding them? Inquiring minds want to know!
ReplyDeleteMeryl--Surprisingly, it didn't. I just print them on regular copy paper, not photo paper, and there are only around 20 or so pages with photos in a journal of about 150 pages. Also, it was a handmade journal with some space in the binding. I just finished it and started a new one in a commercially-made sketch book with a very dense binding. We'll see how it works this time around.
ReplyDeleteI'm intrigued by your question. I can say that at times (not recently, since I've been a negligent blogger), my photos have served as inspiration for writing. Sometimes I write and then insert a photo illustrating what I've been talking about, but other times, the photos lead me to the ideas. Other than that, I don't know that I *do* incorporate my photography into my creative pursuits. It's definitely something to think about.
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