Top Five Nature Journaling Techniques for 2025

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Here are my top five nature journaling techniques for 2025. All lists like this are a bit arbitrary and imperfect. However, these are based on my over 10 years of teaching nature journaling and watching the development of various ideas in the community. Scroll to the bottom to see the full video.

1. Write down your intentions

Why are you nature journaling in the first place? It’s easy to spend years watching videos about it and buying art supplies and wondering why your pages don’t look the way you want. But it would be far better to start a new journal or a new year by writing down your intentions. Sometimes, this is hard because we have a lot of stories around all the decisions we have made. Therefore, I have made some prompts to help you.

Try these prompts to help you get clear about your intentions:

What are the experiences in nature that you never forget?
What is a direction in nature journaling that looks really challenging to you now but you can’t stop thinking about?
What is your growth edge, bread and butter, and juice?
What types of mental states do you want to experience while nature journaling?
Where does your motivation come from? Internal? External? (this is a tough one to be honest with ourselves about. Working through this on paper definitely helps.)

More than half the people who start reading this article will leave when they read the first technique. It’s not as “exciting” or “creative” as something such as wet on wet watercolor. However, those who actually take the time to work on this part will go much further with their art and nature journaling practice and will avoid many mental obstacles and pitfalls.

When you are procrastinating, feeling tired, distracted, or facing the scary blank page it is very helpful if you know why you are nature journaling in the first place.

Final tip for this one: You can make this part fun. Get creative with the lettering and write you values or intentions in the front of you journal or sketchbook. You can even make a custom stamp such as “highly experimental” or “do not judge” or “don’t overthink it!” Then, stamp this message on pages where you are struggling to stay in alignment with your intentions. You can use custom stickers or handwritten sticky notes this way also.

2. Comics: the best way to tell nature stories

When we are drawing a plant or a landscape and suddenly a coyote runs by carrying a jelly donut in it’s mouth we have a choice. Do we just go back to the plant drawing or do we try to capture the interesting event? Comics are a great way to try to get these special moments and this action on the page. A lot of nature journalers are already using comics but it continues to be relevant now more than ever so that is why it made the list for top five nature journaling techniques for 2025.

You can see in option one that you can cheat by just drawing cartoon you telling the story with words. Option two takes a little more work and practice. Either adds a lot to your page.

Keep it simple. It doesn’t have to be accurate.
Use speech bubbles, movement lines, arrows, and expressive lettering.
Feel free to anthropomorphize a little bit (see above).
Comics also play an important role during depressing or tumultuous times.
Here is a video all about making nature comics.

3. Collage, Scrapbook, Junk Journal

There are a lot of reasons why collage, scrapbook, and junk journal techniques should be on the top five nature journaling techniques for 2025. I taught a whole class about this topic at last year’s Wild Wonder Nature Journaling Conference. Below, you can see some of my supplies and materials from that class.

These techniques can help you relax more, make it more fun again, and help you get over some of the artistic blocks that can affect nature journalers.
There are practical applications such as gluing a photo of something onto your page instead of drawing it.
Lots of benefits from a story telling and souvenir perspective especially when traveling. Looking back and seeing your train ticket or stamps from places you visited combined with your nature sketches adds a lot to the page.
See more ideas of how junk journaling can be combined with pressed plants in your nature journal in this video:

4. Point your journal at real issues around you

This is your opportunity to go beyond pretty pictures to make a difference by telling the stories and asking the questions from your life.

You are part of the story.
Your story and questions are needed today more than ever. There are probably natural spaces near you that are under threat or going through enormous changes. Please don’t just draw the pretty flower or images you look up online, try pointing your nature journal at real world issues.
Documenting these in your nature journal might bring up feelings for you but it is important work. You might be afraid to nature journal seemingly sad or depressing things. However, I think this is the perfect way to process them and do something. I plan on doing a video soon about nature journaling grief.
I’m trying to do more of this type of nature journaling myself and on the nature journal show. You can see a recent attempt in this video about a special tree.

5. Recombinatorial Nature Journaling

Recombinatorial Nature Journaling is when you mess around with the chronology of your sketchbooks.
We take for granted that our journals have pages that go in a chronological order and they stay in place. Is that limiting your possibilities?
Sometimes, you can remove pages, move them around, or even (heaven forbid) cut them out of one sketchbook and put them in another!
This concept blew my mind when I first heard about it because it opens up so many possibilities. Watch the episode below to see me apply it in real life.