I’ve thought about starting a perpetual journal for a while now, ever since I started following botanical artist Lara Call Gastinger a few years ago. Now I’ve finally started one.
Lara Call Gastinger, whose artwork I greatly admire, came up with the concept of a perpetual journal. The idea is that the journal pages are organized by date, but not year, and that you return to the same pages at the given date range year after year until the pages are filled up.
If you focus on plants as she does, the result is a dynamic visual record of your observations of your environment throughout the seasons — without the pressure to fill up a page all at once. You can focus on a small subject each week and skip a page if you’re too busy in a given year.
Here’s a video presentation of Lara’s perpetual journal method that includes a demo:
The cyclical nature of the perpetual journal method is very attractive to me and I also am curious about how a perpetual journal can reveal changes in phenology as our planet warms. While my subject matter will be local, I’ve also decided to incorporate the latest headlines concerning climate change into my perpetual journal to put my observations in a global context.
Doom and gloom aren’t the focus of my nature journaling practice. But I think incorporating a record of climate change headlines into my perpetual journal makes sense in a rapidly changing biosphere.
Nature journaling helps me stay rooted in the present when there is a lot of fear about the future.
I know I feel most content when I’m spending time with an individual plant or any other organism or natural object where it resides, and nature journaling is a tool to facilitate this connection. I’m excited to have incorporated the perpetual journal into my nature journaling practice.
I began my first perpetual journal entry last weekend at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s McDonald Woods, a restored woodland that boasts many now rare plants native to this area.
Procecidochares atra
My first subject was a goldenrod that caught my attention because it has spherical cabbage-like galls towards the top of the plant. I didn’t know what they were exactly when I was drawing this plant in the field, but I knew that this individual plant was different than the others around it.
I roughed out a sketch using a graphite-colored Derwent pen. I like this color because it looks like pencil, which I don’t like to use in my sketchbook because it smears. I also like the directness of sketching with a pen and accepting that there will be “mistakes” that cannot be erased.
After getting the basic shapes down, I committed to some of the contours with a black Micron pen (005 nib size).
Once back at my desk, I added background color, added some shading with the pen and used colored pencil to add spot color to one of the galls.
This is hardly the best drawing I’ve ever done and there are lessons I learned from the process: the 0.1 nib on the Derwent pen was too thick and it was hard to do detailed line work with a steady hand in the field. I think the plant parts in the drawing would be clearer if I had done only the rough sketch in the field but done all the refining at my desk using reference photos. I have typically done all of my nature journaling in the field, so this will be a new way of working for me.
I’m not sure that adding a background enhanced my drawing. But this is the great thing about working in a sketchbook — you can experiment and see what you like and what works for you. And with the perpetual journal method, I’ll be layering in more drawings onto the page and this study of the goldenrod galls will not necessarily be the main focus in the end.
I overworked this one. I think the drawing may have been clearer in its earlier stages.
That’s another aspect that attracted me to the perpetual journal method — seeing my style and technique develop and improve over time on the same page. I also think that this practice will improve my sense of composition. My perpetual journal can also serve as a reference for any studio pieces that I do in the future.
And as for the galls, those are plant deformities caused by another organism. These particular galls were ID’ed on iNaturalist as Procecidochares atra, a species of fruit fly that favors goldenrods.
The insect enters plant tissue while it is still forming, stimulating the tissue to stimulate growth and provide more nutrients. The resulting galls provide shelter and a source of food to developing larvae or nymphs but don’t cause significant damage to the host plant. Gall-producing organisms are usually host-specific and many galls are formed in a specific part of the host plant. (Eiseman and Charney, p. 377)
Galls fascinate me because of their weirdness and because they show the dependence of species on one another. I’m sure many more galls will find their way into my perpetual journal as well as other phenomena that pique my curiosity and wonder.
Source: Tracks & Signs of Insects and Other Invertebrates by Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney, Stackpole Books, 2010