Activity 3-1: Prompts for Visual Media

Motivation
When you create art, you enter into partnership with the subject you choose. Drawing or painting something or composing a photograph is an intimate act. Creating an image forces you to look closely at the details of your subject, its proportions, and its relationship to its surroundings. By reflecting your subject in art you honor both its innate beauty and the way that you see it through your unique experience. 
Things to Try
You can respond to any of these prompts using whatever visual media you like--pencil sketches, crayon, painting, photography, collage, or digital illustration to name a few. Choose something you are comfortable with, or try something new. Try a few prompts with the same media, or one prompt with different media.
Individual Flowers, Plants, or Leaves
These classic subjects are great for drawing your attention to details. Pay attention to how the parts of a flower fit together. Notice how light filters through petals and forms shadows on the contours of leaves. Choose a leaf from several different kinds of trees in the park and notice how their shapes differ and what they have in common. 
Clouds
Clouds offer endless variations of shape and texture, ranging from barely-visible wisps to towering thunderheads, from joyful puffballs to menacing walls of storm. Clouds play with light, offering brilliant sunrises, catching mid-day glow on their crinkled tops, or sending shadows scudding across the ground. What wonders can you see in a week or month of variations on clouds?
Insects
While most wildlife come and go, you are almost guaranteed to find a variety of insects in any park on any given day (except in winter). Many people don't think of insects as beautiful (except butterflies), but when you look closely they offer a rainbow of vibrant colors and array of interesting shapes. Insects are also relatively easy to sketch. 
Different Angles of a Single Tree
Trees are much more complex than the lollipop style mass of leaves atop a trunk, and there is no better way to see the intricate beauty of a tree than by looking through the lens of art. Experiment with different distances, from a close-up of the bark's texture to how the tree relates to its companions. Lay on the ground and look up into the canopy, or climb into the tree's branches for another perspective. Does the tree look different from different directions? If you chose a companion tree in Activity 2-1, this is a good chance to honor her with a series of portraits.
A Single Tree at Different Times
As you may have noted in Activity 2-2, trees can change dramatically over the course of a year. This is especially true of deciduous trees, but others go through seasonal changes as well. Try creating a series of works of the same tree in different seasons, or every few days during a time of rapid change. For deciduous trees, you might frame the whole tree. For coniferous trees, focusing on a smaller area where new growth and cones are apparent may be more effective. This type of zoomed in approach can work well for deciduous trees too.

For a quicker project, consider a tree in different conditions of weather or light. How does morning light hit the bark? How does the tree react to strong wind? How do the tree's leaves capture or shed water in the rain?
Resources
For the reluctant artist - If you hesitate to try these activities because you think you can't draw, check out this International Nature Journaling Week page. You'll find plenty of resources to get past the judgement of your inner critic and get comfortable with a sketchbook.
With a few deft brush strokes of white on a blue ground, a meteorological artist sketches a pair of salsa dancers whirling through a spin.

October 20, 2016 ~ Horton Park
Suggested Reading
Braiding Sweetgrass chapter: "Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket" - The Potawatomi Nation has an ancestral tradition of fashioning baskets from thin strips of Black Ash wood. In a workshop with a master basket maker, Kimmerer experiences the deep relationship that creating a basket forges between tree and artist. At the end of the workshop, the teacher describes the collection of baskets made by the students--"Every one of them is beautiful. Every one of them is different and yet every one of them began in the same tree. They are all made of the same stuff and yet each is itself."

Chased by the Light: A 90-Day Journey, by Jim Brandenburg - Chased by the Light was one of the inspirations behind my original 2016 Moments in the Park project. Brandenburg is a nature photographer based in Northern Minnesota. He often worked on stories for National Geographic, for which he would take thousands of shots, selecting only a handful of the best to appear in the final product. Eventually he became restless, sensing that such a shotgun approach was stifling his creativity. He decided to settle in to his home base in the north woods and return to the core of his craft, honing in on carefully selecting each shot, paying close attention to framing, focus, and the angle of the light. He set himself the challenge of exposing exactly one frame of film (it was back in the pre-digital days) each day between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. The result is a stunning collection of images, from wide angle landscape views to macro lens close-ups, from aurora borealis shimmering just after midnight to sunlight streaming through the trees. Together, they trace the transition of the landscape and its inhabitants from activity to dormancy as fall turns to winter. (This video provides additional background on his journey.)