Cold Prairie Studio

The perfect opportunity to start filling my summer nature journal came along this weekend at the Paddockwood Library’s Mushroom Workshop.

I’d picked up a new watercolour sketchbook a few weeks back. It seemed a nice size for carrying along (245mm x 176mm), and the paper is beautiful. The goal is to fill it by summer’s end.

The workshop was for beginners and provided an overview of resources and a discussion of how to collect information for mushroom identification. It then covered the necessary topic of toxic and lethal mushrooms, before going over a selection of edible mushrooms for beginners.

Working in a sketchbook during a class with time constraints, there’s no time for perfectionism. Details and shapes will be imperfect. For this reason (and the obvious potential dangers associated with harvesting and eating wild mushrooms) this is not meant in any way to be used as a field guide!

I’m a beginner when it comes to mushrooms, and I am not yet comfortable to do anything other than appreciate them from a safe distance! However, I find that sketching helps me to remember things better in general. Keeping nature journals has helped me to remember names and facts and observations. There’s something my brain likes about adding a visual component to note-taking.

Working quickly to get as much information down as possible in a short space of time, you can always go back in and add more colour and ink, once the information’s on the page. For this reason, colour notes can be really helpful while sketching out basic shapes. (I also stole my husband’s notes after class to copy some extra bits of info.) In grade school I would fill the margins of my notebooks with doodles. Filling entire pages in class is way more fun.