How I take notes in my sketchbook

I got an interesting question in my recent Q&A about the notes in my sketchbook: whether I mainly write down colors and visual details for me to check at home, or also something about the location or points of botanical interests. Since I mainly take notes in German, I know my scribblings can be hard to interpret.

So I thought about how I take my notes, and not surprisingly, some aspects have stayed the same over the years, and some of what I write down has changed a bit.

From the beginning, I often wrote down when I found something particularly interesting about a landscape, a discovery in nature, or an animal encounter. I always add the date, and going back to these entries now is still interesting to me and reactivates memories. I still try to add these little stories to my sketchbook when they happen to me. Here is an early page from 2018 documenting an entirely empty reservoir lake, a moth that I wanted to identify, and a whinchat.

I often write down what the weather is like, or if there are big changes in nature that I can see (like the first swifts arriving, when trees are blooming, the first snow). This can be interesting to compare with the entries of previous years. In April 2024 I’ve noted that the cherry trees were blooming earlier than the year before, the chestnuts were starting to bloom, and that I already saw a few newborn lambs among the herd of sheep in our local park (the sheep are brought into this big park in the middle of the city every year and help to keep the grass short – everyone loves them).

I used to add a lot of facts about what I was sketching, I often read up on the birds and plants I found outside and then added parts of that information next to the sketch. When I started my nature sketchbooks, I learned a lot about anatomy, scientific terms, etc., so some of the pages looked like anatomy studies which I would refer back to. This is a fun way to learn.

When I still sketched a lot on location (which is something I hope I’ll finally get back to more this year!) I sometimes added notes about colors, details, etc. for finishing the sketch at home, but to be honest, most of the time I also snapped a quick photo and found that I mostly referred to that afterward. In the case of colors that can be misleading, so maybe it’s time to get back to these color studies. It’s usually most helpful for botanical work, since landscapes are not so dependent on actual color, and animals are usually gone before you can mix a specific color anyway!

I remember that year (2022) I had three different magentas/purples in my palette and was still unable to match the vivid pink of those orchids – it’s just impossible. I learnt a lot about letting go of “super-exact colors” that year.

For more involved color tests I also have a separate sketchbook, and a while ago I started creating to create pages that are on a specific subject, with lots of color swatches and notes – like the ones I recently shared for the apple blossoms. These are a lot of fun to do. I think I will continue with these themed swatches from time to time, they’re also a good reminder.

Sometimes I also wrote down what the weather was like.

I thought I also had a few examples for notes about more personal things, like how I felt on a certain day, gratitude lists, etc. I have completely moved this part over to a separate written journal now and I don’t really feel like adding a lot from my personal life to my visual sketchbook. I guess this entry from early 2024 shortly after my first surgery is an example: it shows items I took with me to rehab: leg warmers and a small sketching kit, and there’s a random dried flower that has a note on my low energy level.

Overall, I feel I take less notes these days. I went through a phase where I just experimented with sketching and only felt like expressing myself with brush and pencil marks, not so much with words, and the character of the sketchbooks changed a bit from documenting nature to exploring art techniques, and simply trying to stay active with my sketching. For landscape sketches, I often feel that I don’t need to add anything more than the location and the date.

And as mentioned, I took up journaling again in a separate notebook, so that’s where all the thoughts and extra words end up these days. But I’m sure this will change again. Somehow I miss my old style of journaling when I look at these older posts.

Maybe one word about the tools I use for note taking: the same I use for drawing – mostly fountain pens with different inks. Unfortunately I often take notes with my pencil, which tends to become illegible after a while.

I hope this was an interesting insight into how and why I take notes. There are definitely more interesting ways to add text to your sketchbooks than what I do currently! When I started this blog, I also collected lots of ideas for adding notes to sketches, you can find them here:

Different Sketchbook Styles – Methods For Observing And Drawing In Your Nature Journal

(And a last example from 2019: my notes just state the location, and the plants & animals I saw outside)