There’s a particular kind of creative restlessness that hits when you’ve been working in the same space for too long. Same desk, same light, same four walls. Your journal starts to feel like it belongs to that room — to that particular chair, that particular cup of tea. The pages feel a little predictable.
The cure, it turns out, is to take the whole thing outside. More specifically: into the woods, up a mountain, along a trail. Because something happens to your art journaling practice when you bring it into nature. The light is different. The textures are different. The sounds are different. And you, sitting on a rock or a log or a patch of grass with your journal open in your lap, are different too.
Here’s everything you need to know about taking your art journal on a hike.
Why It’s Worth the Effort
Before we get into the practicalities, let’s talk about why this is worth doing at all — because yes, it takes planning, and yes, your pack will be heavier, and yes, you might end up with a page that has an actual smear of trail dirt on it (which, frankly, is wonderful).
Nature forces you to work with what’s in front of you. There’s no going to get a different reference photo, no adjusting the lighting, no choosing a more convenient subject. You have the view from where you’re sitting, the colors that are actually there, the sounds that are actually happening. This constraint is enormously freeing. Some of the most focused, present, *in-the-moment* art journaling happens on a trail because there’s simply nothing else pulling at your attention.
There’s also the matter of scale. In nature, you’re small. The mountains don’t care about your inner critic. The trees are not evaluating your color mixing. This perspective — literal and figurative — has a way of dissolving the self-consciousness that can creep into studio work. You’re just a person with a journal, making marks under an open sky.
What to Pack (and What to Leave Behind)
The single most important principle for trail journaling is: bring less than you think you need. The temptation is to pack every supply you might conceivably want. Resist this. A lighter pack means a longer hike means more places to sit and journal. And constraint, as we’ve already established, is creative fuel.
The essentials:
Your journal, obviously. For hiking, a hardcover journal works better than a softcover — you need a stable surface to work on, and you won’t always have a flat rock handy. Smaller is better for portability; a 5×7 or A5 size is ideal.
A small watercolor set. Watercolors are the trail journaler’s best friend — they’re compact, they dry fast, and water is often right there. A travel tin with 12 to 24 colors is plenty. Bring a small brush roll with just three or four brushes: a large wash brush, a medium round, and a small detail brush.
A waterproof mechanical pencil or a couple of pens that won’t bleed in humidity. Micron pens and Staedtler waterproof fineliners both hold up well outdoors.
A small water container — a tiny folding silicone cup works great, or repurpose a travel-size container. You’ll need to change your water frequently since you likely won’t have much of it.
Paper towels or a small rag for blotting. A few folded sheets tucked into a ziplock bag take up almost no space.
Optional but worthwhile:
Washi tape for securing pages if it’s windy. A small spray bottle to keep your palette moist. A tiny jar of white gouache for highlights. One or two colored pencils for finishing touches. A glue stick if you want to incorporate natural elements (more on that in a moment).
What to leave behind:
Anything in a glass jar. Heavy books. Your full brush collection. Mediums that need drying time. Anything you’d be heartbroken to lose or damage.
Choosing Where to Stop
Not every spot on a trail is a journaling spot. Part of the art of trail journaling is learning to recognize a good one.
Look for: a comfortable place to sit where you can stay for 20–30 minutes without getting cold or uncomfortable. Interesting sightlines — you want something worth looking at, whether that’s a sweeping view, a mossy root system, a creek, or the way light is coming through the canopy. Some protection from direct sun if you’re painting watercolors, since sun dries paint almost instantly and makes it hard to blend.
Don’t feel obligated to journal at the summit or the “best” view. Some of the most interesting subject matter is found mid-trail — the place where the path turns, the fallen tree covered in lichen, the small waterfall you almost walked past. Look down as well as out. The close-up world at your feet is endlessly rich.
What to Actually Do When You Get There
Sit for a minute before you open your journal. Just look. Let your eyes adjust to the scene and find what’s actually interesting to you — not what you think should be interesting, but what’s drawing your gaze. This is your subject.
Start with light pencil marks to establish basic shapes and proportions. Then lay in broad watercolor washes for large areas — sky, ground, distant hills. Work from light to dark. Let things be loose. This is not the place for tight, detailed rendering (though if that’s your instinct, follow it). The goal is to capture the feeling of the place as much as the look of it.
Don’t worry about finishing. Trail journal pages don’t have to be complete compositions. A page that’s two-thirds sky with some gestural marks at the bottom can be beautiful and evocative. A color study of just the bark in front of you is a legitimate page. Notes and words mixed in with the imagery are encouraged — write down what you hear, what you smell, how your body feels sitting in this particular spot.
If you want to incorporate the place itself into the page, now is the time. Press a leaf or a flower petal onto wet paint for a print. Pick up a small piece of dirt or bark dust and rub it into the page. Use a twig as a drawing implement. Let the trail leave its mark.
Dealing With the Practical Challenges
Wind is the main adversary of outdoor journaling. Washi tape on your pages helps. A small clip can keep the back pages from flapping. If it’s really gusty, shift to dry media — pencil and colored pencil rather than watercolor.
Sun dries your watercolors faster than you expect. Compensate by working quickly, keeping your palette moist with a spray bottle, and embracing the granulation and blooms that come from fast-drying paint. They look like nature. Because they are.
Insects are interested in you and your journal. Try not to swat them onto your page. (Easier said than done. A bug smear is also, in its own way, a record of the experience.)
Other hikers will look at what you’re doing. Most will say something kind. A few will want to watch. You get to decide how you feel about this — but most trail journalers find that the unselfconsciousness of being outside extends to being observed, too.
Bringing the Hike Home
Your trail journal page doesn’t have to be finished on the trail. Many journalers use the outdoor session to make quick studies — value sketches, color notes, gestural impressions — and then continue working at home while the experience is still fresh.
You can also bring home materials to incorporate later: pressed plants, small stones, a piece of interesting bark, a feather. These become collage elements and tactile reminders of the specific place and day.
And when you get home, write. Even just a few sentences about where you were, what the weather was like, who you were with, what you were thinking about. This text transforms a visual study into a journal page — something with context and meaning that you’ll return to years from now and remember exactly.
Starting Small
You don’t need to plan an ambitious day hike for your first trail journaling experience. Start with a park. A nature trail. A patch of woods you can reach in twenty minutes. Bring your journal and a few supplies and sit somewhere outside for half an hour.
The point isn’t the destination. It’s the practice of bringing your creative attention into a different space — of letting the living world into your pages. Once you do it once, you’ll find yourself looking for excuses to do it again.
Your journal, it turns out, has been waiting for this all along.