After last week’s look at how field scientists do nature-inspired art, it’s only fitting to take a look at how art does nature. Over the past decade, illustrator Jill Bliss has charmed the world with her colorful, playful and distinctive nature-inspired designs, brimming with vibrant dots, lines and other bold shapes. This season, she’s inviting the rest of us to join her in this wonderful visual language for celebrating nature. In Drawing Nature: A Journal by Jill Bliss, she offers an invaluable guide to drawing natural objects with ease, joy and, yes, artistic merit. Almost scientific in its methodical rigor, the journal features a series of exercises broken down into categories, each starting out with blind contour drawings and building upon them to break your expectations of what a natural object is “supposed” to look like.

Throughout the years, I’ve learned various techniques to successfully teach people who aren’t necessarily drawers how to draw and how to see things better by drawing them.” ~ Jill Bliss

Images courtesy of Buy Olympia

Whimsical, artful and meditative, Drawing Nature is the missing link between your favorite childhood pastimes and that always-wanted-to-learn-but-never-got-around-to-it grown-up creative hobby.