Nothing To Do? How About Some Nature Art?

For example, here is “Claire” with vines.

A good place to begin your adventures into drawing nature art is to start with your name. Design a font style for the letters in your name, or copy an existing one. Then embellish your name with vines, branches, leaves, fruit, pine cones, butterflies, flowers, lizards, monkeys, birds or whatever nature themes you enjoy drawing.

Look into the garden and imagine what your name would look like if pea vine spelled it out. Look in a pond and suppose that the water-lily pads created your initials. What if a row of tree trunks and their branches contained your name?

Go formal. Create an elegant nature motif or design which could be used on a letterhead or a holiday car, or a wedding invitation or a business card. I find Virginia creeper to be very graceful, and for decades a pair of these stencils framed the upper doorways of our house, and also framed letters sent to friends.

Young growth of many plant species can be pressed and dried in graceful positions for future reference, see last week’s blog for details.

Create a very stylized design. For example here are five little bats wingtip to wingtip forming a circle. This design has flourishes in the orient for millennia; see my blog “East Bats, West Bats” on June 21, 2018, for the symbology of these five bats.

Here is another sample of a stylized design, just form frogs facing each other, by Mark Rouw, in “A Field Guide to the Amphibians and Reptiles of Iowa,” p.116.

So try your hand at some of these versions of nature art. Your models might be in your own yard, or in the nearest Bur Oak Land Trust property.

Tags: Bur Oak Land Trust, Lon Drake, nature art