How to Sketch on a Walk: A Simple One-Hour Nature Sketching Practice
- Mar 18
- 4 min read
Sketching while walking is one of the simplest ways to develop your drawing skills. You don’t need a lot of time or equipment. A sketchbook and a couple of pencils are enough. This one-hour outdoor sketching practice is designed for moments when you’re out for a walk and can pause briefly along the way. You might stop three or four times, sketch for a few minutes, and then continue your walk.
These sketches are not meant to be finished drawings. Think of them as visual notes - quick observations that train your eye to notice shapes, patterns and light in the landscape.
Materials
For this nature sketching practice you only need a few simple materials:
Sketchbook - something light and small enough to fit in your backpack
A couple of pencils (a soft pencil such as 6B works well)
A black biro
Anything else you enjoy sketching with, such as watercolour pencils, wax crayons or graphite
Keep your materials light and simple so you can sketch easily whenever something catches your eye.
A One-Hour Outdoor Sketching Practice
This practice includes four short sketching exercises that you can do while walking. Each exercise takes around 15 minutes, giving you a complete hour of sketching in nature.
Exercise 1: Contour Drawing the Skyline
Find somewhere comfortable to pause and spend a minute simply looking around.
Look at the skyline — the tops of trees, the line of hills, or the shapes of branches against the sky.
Now begin to trace the skyline slowly with your eyes. As your eyes move along the line, let your pencil follow the same movement on the page. Try not to look at the paper while drawing.
Repeat this a few times. Perhaps overlapping the first drawing so you literally get contour lines developing on your page.
This type of contour drawing helps build a direct connection between what you see and how your hand moves.
The aim isn’t accuracy but observation — allowing your drawing to follow the rhythm of the landscape.
Exercise 2: Sketching the Big Picture
Shift your attention to the wider landscape. Look around and notice the larger shapes:
tall trees
distant hills
the shapes of a path or stream
Choose a point in the scene to focus on and begin sketching. Let your hand move freely across the page, capturing the overall feeling of the place rather than small details. Think of your lines as gestures — movements that echo the rhythm of what you see. After a few minutes, pause and look at your sketch. Notice the marks and how it felt to respond to the whole scene.
As you are sketching, keep your hand and pencil loose - be as free as you can or want with your marks. You are not trying to replicate the landscape - you are responding to it. For you, a series of dashes may represent birds flying in the sky. Or a series of squiggles nearby plants.
Exercise 3: The Small Picture
Now shift your focus from the wide landscape to something small and close by. You may want to switch to a black pen for this - it's easier to get finer lines. But choose whatever you feel comfortable with.
Choose something that catches your eye:
a leaf
a flower
the bark of a tree
seed heads or grasses
a small stone or shell
Begin sketching what you see in more detail. You might make a few small sketches on the page, like entries in a nature diary.
Observe textures and patterns - the veins of a leaf, the rough surface of bark, or the way petals overlap. Allow yourself to become absorbed in the details.
These small studies develop your ability to look closely and record what you see.
Exercise 4: Expressive Mark Making
For the final exercise, choose an object, but this time shift your focus away from what it is and towards how it feels to draw it.
Look for something with interesting movement or texture:
long grasses moving in the wind
tangled branches
rough tree bark
clusters of leaves or seed heads
Rather than outlining or carefully drawing, begin to explore the subject through marks.
Try different types of marks:
quick, short dashes
long flowing lines
dots and taps
scribbles or looping lines
heavier, darker marks and lighter, softer ones
Let your marks respond to what you see:
light, airy marks for delicate plants
dense, layered marks for shadow or tangled areas
sweeping lines for movement
You might fill a whole page with one type of mark, or layer several different marks on top of each other.
A helpful way to loosen up is to hold your pencil further back, or even switch to something more expressive like a graphite stick or wax crayon.
There’s no need to “build” a drawing here. Think of this as exploring how your hand can describe the energy, texture and rhythm of what’s in front of you.
Pause after a few minutes and look at your page. Notice how different marks create different feelings and how they begin to suggest the landscape without needing to define it clearly.
Why Sketching on a Walk Improves Your Painting
Sketching outdoors trains your eye to notice the structure of the natural world.
These small sketches help you:
observe shapes more clearly
understand how plants and landscapes grow and connect
notice patterns of light and shadow
build confidence in drawing quickly
Over time, these observations feed naturally into your watercolour paintings.
A Helpful Mindset
Think of these sketches as visual notes rather than finished artwork. They are moments of observation and attention. The more often you sketch in nature, the more your eye begins to notice shape, pattern and rhythm in the landscape.
Try This on Your Next Walk
Take your sketchbook with you on your next walk and try these four simple outdoor sketching exercises.
Each place you visit will offer new shapes, textures and patterns to explore — and every small sketch adds to your understanding of the world around you.
If you'd like to take this further, join one of my in-person workshops or overseas retreats, where one of the things we explore is how we can turn these fun ,quick sketches into expressive paintings.
