Review: Illustrated Nature Journaling by Gay Kraeger (Craftsy)

Illustrated Nature Journaling is a video course for those who like drawing nature, animals and journaling.

The instructor Gay Kraeger is an artist who has over 20 years of experience and has been journaling for as long. I often see her works as examples included in instructional sketchbooks, such as in the Artist's Journal Workshop or An Illustrated Life.

The whole course runs for 135 minutes and is split into seven lessons, namely:

1. Keep it Simple to Start - 21 min
2. Create Landscape Elements Quickly - 29 min
3. Capturing a Landscape - 19 min
4. Adding Depth and Drama with Ink - 13 min
5. Capture Beauty and Drama of Water - 27 min
6. Capturing Action: Drawing Birds - 11 min
7. Tie It Together with Typography - 15 min

This course is targeted at beginners so you don't need any drawing experience.

The different subjects you'll be learning to draw in are landscapes, flowers, water, grass, trees, rocks, birds and other elements from nature.

In the course, you'll learn the drawing process. For example, Gay Kraeger has a tutorial for drawing a mountainous landscape from start to finish and there are different drawing concept being taught, such as layering techniques, how to treat foreground and background, or handle contour drawing, basic colouring, lifting colours and adding textures,

Throughout the course, she also introduces several unorthodox painting techniques to painting, such as using the fan brush, salt and even the Wet-Erase Markers. She also teaches you how to save the white of the paper by using masking fluid, tape, wax resist and crayons.

Last lesson, she talks about how you can design your own journal pages, how to layout, use text and make your pages look beautiful.

The goal of the course is to teach you simple techniques that you can follow along so that you can start the journaling habit.

Overall, the course is easy to follow along. You can also check out more journal pages from her Flickr page.

Enroll in the course or check out more reviews on Craftsy. There's a 50% discount specially for Parkablogs readers until 30 March 2016.

Disclosure: This course was provided to me by Craftsy for review purposes. You can support Parka Blogs by using the affiliate links as I get a little commission from each sale. :-)