Plants → brain

My best friend and I both got International Baccalaureate (IB) diplomas in high school (WE LIVED BITCH). The main things this gets you are lifelong disdain for the American education system, an assortment of anxiety disorders, and early experience with health issues caused by physical and emotional stress.

In IB Art, there's this thing called the Research Work Book, a sketchbook where you're supposed to be tracking all of the things that are going into your larger projects but then also, for "fun", each "spread" should also look good composition-wise. It was basically telling some sleep-deprived, overworked high school students that if you like art so much then why don't you let it destroy you??? You had to mail all of your books off to Switzerland or some shit to get it graded before you were awarded your diploma. At the time it was a nightmare, and we regularly stayed up past 2AM working on these things, waiting for those cursed watercolor washes to dry, in addition to hours and hours of other coursework. 

Of course now, 18 years later, we are bringing the RWB BACK, BABY! But in like, an actually healthy way? Both of us have wanted to get into nature journaling/sketching for a while, because we are both little freaks for and of the earth. Britt is farther along on her naturalist journey than I am, and it is EXTREMELY COOL and inspiring to watch her carve out space for this work in her life. I got her a little field watercolor set for her birthday, and we popped on FaceTime and started working through A Field Guide to Color. 

One thing I remember from IB Biology specifically was that the best way to get a concept into my head was to sketch it, even though teen Gina was so resistant to this because: extra work. Clearly something is happening with my neural pathways when I draw a thing in addition to taking notes about it, though! Like the act of eye/hand/brain coordination it requires to do so activates a hyper-node in there. I'd like to turn my eight million neighborhood flower photos into small, color-washed journal entries. Seeing them accumulate is just as much the goal as cementing deeper knowledge on plant identification into my neural bedrock. I want to get better at identifying trees especially, as despite being a weirdo about them for years, I still get tripped up by most species.

My biggest challenge here is going to be that I'll likely be bad at this for at least a few months, and I famously hate being bad at things. I think I just have to make it part of my routine to practice this! I already know that just taking photos of the plants doesn't work; they sort of just glance off my brain as yet another assortment of pixels in my glowing stressful rectangle. Establishing a creative practice was the job that the universe dealt me at the beginning of the year, so this is one way to do that!