Field Notes
Every nature journaler eventually hits the same wall: you've carved out an afternoon, packed your bag, laced your boots, and then the sky opens up. Or the wind picks up. Or the fog rolls in so thick you can't see the far side of the meadow. It's tempting to call it a wash and retreat to the couch. But some of the most interesting journal pages come from days when the weather refused to behave.
The trick is to stop treating bad weather as an obstacle and start treating it as the subject. Rain, wind, fog, and snow all change how the world looks, and those changes are exactly what a nature journal is built to capture. You just need to adjust what you're paying attention to.
When it rains, the obvious move is to sketch the rain itself—slanted lines, drips off a leaf, ripples in a puddle. That works, but it gets old fast. A richer approach is to sketch what the rain is doing to everything else. How does water bead on a fern frond versus a maple leaf versus your own sleeve? Where does the runoff gather on a trail, and what does that tell you about the slope you're standing on? A single puddle can show you the shape of an entire hillside if you read it carefully.
Wind is similar. Instead of trying to draw a tree that won't hold still, draw the tree's response to the wind. Which branches bend first? Do the grasses lean in unison or in waves? If you're near water, watch how the surface breaks into chop and where the calm patches sit. These are observations you'd miss entirely on a still day, and they make for journal pages that feel alive.
Fog is a gift for sketchers who worry about detail. It erases the far distance and forces you to work in layers of grey. Start with the shapes closest to you, then the next layer back, then the next. You'll end up with a page that captures depth in a way a clear day rarely allows.
If you're going to keep journaling through weather, it helps to build a small kit that works in tight, dry spaces. A hardcover journal beats a soft one when there's no flat surface. A pencil or fine-liner beats watercolor when your hands are cold or the page is damp. A simple zip pouch keeps everything together so you're not digging through a pack with numb fingers.
You can also journal from inside. A window, a car with the engine off, a covered porch, a bus shelter—any of these give you a frame on the outside world. Sketching through glass has its own quirks (reflections, slightly muted colors), but those quirks become part of the record. Ten years from now, a page drawn from a fogged-up kitchen window will tell you more about that morning than a perfectly composed field sketch ever could.
The point isn't to suffer through bad weather. It's to notice that weather is never really bad for journaling—it's just different material. The days you'd normally skip are often the ones worth remembering most.
