Annalena: Artofzoo

Leave the "Species Checklist" at home. Leave the Instagram grid out of your mind. Just take one tool—your camera, your sketchbook, or even just a stick to draw in the mud.

The most exciting trend in nature art right now is the blend. Print your photo on watercolor paper and paint into the highlights. Use a digital tablet to add sketched lines over your wolf photograph. Carve the silhouette of your best bird shot into a linocut print. You don't have to choose between the lens and the brush. A Quiet Call to Action This weekend, I challenge you to go outside without a goal.

A perfectly sharp, clinically lit animal on a green background is a catalog image. A soft, moody shot of a lion in the rain with motion blur in the grass? That is a painting. Don't delete the blurry shots. Some of them are just impressionistic . artofzoo annalena

Watch the way the light hits a squirrel’s tail. Notice how the moss grows in a perfect spiral on the north side of the oak. Listen to the crickets not as noise, but as a rhythm section for the setting sun.

Then, create something. Not to prove you were there, but to share how it felt to be there. Leave the "Species Checklist" at home

Don’t just photograph the whole animal. Zoom in on the texture of the bark where a bear scratched. Capture the reflection of a flamingo in the water, upside down. Shoot the dust motes floating in a sunbeam inside a wolf’s fur. Art lives in the details.

When you stop trying to "get the shot" and start trying to translate the emotion of the wild, photography becomes art. I recently visited an exhibit of John James Audubon’s bird prints. Technically, they aren't "perfect" by modern photographic standards. But the life in them is staggering. The most exciting trend in nature art right now is the blend

Stay wild. Stay curious.