Field Notes

Flip through the pages of my summer sketchbook

Above is a photo of my class’s sketchbooks at the toe of the Kennicott Glacier on the second day of the field sketching workshop with the Wrangell Mountains Center. We spend a lovely afternoon sitting by the glacier edge, listening to the rocks plunk into the water, looking at snow covered mountains, puzzling out how to paint rock covered ice, and matching the silty, turquoise of the lake water. I love seeing all the approaches to sketching the landscape and the different elements that each person chose to focus on.

Summer is winding down in Alaska, but there is still so much to enjoy! There are spaces left in my Field Sketching workshop in Seward, September 6-7. We’ll balance time indoors, working in a cozy classroom space if it rains, with time outdoors along the shoreline and trails of inspiring downtown Seward. I just taught a field sketching workshop in McCarthy, and students loved having the dedicated time to get together and work, learning new approaches for watercolor and mixed media, ways to accurately capture the complex landscape, and slowing down to look at details in the surrounding landscape, and learning about plants and rocks. Let me know if you have any questions.

I’d love for you to join us in Seward. Learn more and sign up.

Sketchbook page in progress. Studying the botany of some of my favorite alpine plants: Woolly lousewort (left) and Diapensia (right). I usually start my sketches with a rough pencil outline and then refine those shapes with pen and maybe add color.

In early June, I packed up my things (sketching gear, waterproof boots, sun layers, warm layers, zero-degree sleeping bag, etc.) and headed to Toolik Field Station for two weeks. This morning I am heading out for a last one-week backpacking trip with some friends because the weather forecast looks good. In between, I taught a seven-week field studies program and another field sketching workshop. All summer, I’ve barely sat down at the computer except to write a few e-mails, set up meetings, and send in my weekly nature journal column for the Copper River Record. I’ve always embraced summers like this: moving often, spending more days recording notes in my sketchbook than on my computer, and sleeping more nights in my puffy down sleeping bag than in my bed. Last year, I wrote my end-of-summer entry about “backcountry delights”.

These delights remain true, and I wanted to share some of my notes from the field from this summer, at least from my time so far out in the Wrangells. I love to shift my perspective from looking at things up close, in particular creating botanical sketches and rock studies, to looking at the big, vast landscape. I’ll take you through my sketchbook from the summer.

One of the subjects I wanted to work on this summer was getting to know the different vetches and oxytropes, who are plants in the pea family. The sketch above is of Nutzotin milk vetch, which has cool curved seed pods. I’ve only seen it growing in one spot near the upper lakes of Donoho.

Nutzotin milk vetch study

Milk vetch study

Story of a zebra rock

One workshop I did with students was finding a rock and creating a page to tell the story. It was fun seeing the different approaches. I didn’t finish everything I started in the field, and here is one example. I’d love to color this in and add some more detail to the zebra texture, but I am glad I started this sketch.

Another unfinished sketch of a Moonwort fern

I addition to making studies of plants and rocks up close, we also spent lots of time looking at patterns and puzzling out why the landscape looks the way it does. Many of these pages are quicker, more diagrammatic sketches.

Notes about the intermittent stream at the Fosse. Later on I hiked up the the source of the stream to see the glaciers feeding it.

We had some excellent opportunities to look down on the glacier surface from a lateral moraine. Here, I started a sketch looking at the surface of the glacier where it was calving off and forming a lake between the ice and the lateral moraine. I sketch what I observe from above, and then imagine what it would look like from the side, if I cut a slice through the glacier. Then I put those two images together into a block diagram.

Aaron, one of the other instructors, taught a class on mapping the landscape and looking at the geologic story in a place. Here I diagramed moraines and lakes from upper Donoho basin next to the Gates Glacier.

One of my favorite parts of being out in the field for so long is getting to spend time with the mountains and to sketch the bigger landscape. This often feels overwhelming because there is so much going on, but I enjoy the meditation.

Goat Hair Peak and hanging glaciers sketched from the Fosse

Another unfinished sketch. This one from our camp at National Creek Pass.

View north from Donoho Lakes

Thanks for flipping through some of my sketchbook pages with me. I hope you enjoyed the journey. I’d love to know what you’ve been sketching this summer.