Drawing Marine Life for Nature Study

Fish are a bit difficult to record in your nature journal unless you’re watching them through an aquarium. In my experience, even after already honing our observation skills with birds that flit from tree to tree and out of sight, when we went snorkeling, it proved more challenging to remember all the colors and patterns we saw underwater! 

What helped was that as soon as possible, we would Google and find them and save the photos on our phone. That way, we can draw them as soon as we got to our nature journals. Someone also gifted me a field guide of Philippine fishes and marine life, and we were very happy to spot some of our finds in the book. Our nature journal entries for underwater creatures relied on these. 

But, do you know that before we had cameras, naturalists would actually draw their subjects from live, moving models? Like those who sketch birds who fly away, some people are able to draw the fish from underwater too!

For example, we recently visited a friend whose late father was an artist. We were amazed to see some of his paintings of the exact same fishes we’ve found in our snorkeling gracing this friend’s house, all framed up and spicing up the house’s decor. She told us that when her dad was young, an American tourist who loved snorkeling and diving would invite him to come along so that he could paint the things they see underwater as soon as they came back out of the water!

Future naturalist goals? 

In any case, we can start with drawing fish, at least, from pictures, but for other creatures like shellfish, starfish, beach rocks and pebbles, we can draw them from the actual models.