6th June 2025: Nature Journaling with Alex Boon (with a section on using Inktense pencils)
Thanks Chris, for these photos and for the write-up.

Alex Boon shared with us his overlapping passions for art and the natural world.  He is based in Seaton and the art studios at Colyton but spends much of his time observing and recording in the outdoors.

As a child Alex was much taken with his grandmother's copy of Edith Holden's bestselling Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. Along with the diaries and exacting observational illustrations of such as Beatrix Potter, Holden helped forge the template for nature journaling that Alex would come to exemplify. 

This led to a childhood ambition to become a writer/illustrator, which he achieved by a circuitous route. He enrolled for a degree in Illustration in Lincoln but hated it and soon left.  Instead he followed a science route, gaining a BSc in Environmental Science and then PhD focused on Soil Science.

Alex then fused these disparate interests after moving to Devon in 2016 and taking up nature journaling.

​https://alexboonart.com/nature-journaling/

In these journals Alex documents his writing, his scientific observations, his diary notes, his illustrator's sense of cohesive design and layout and, of course, his artistic skills.

Alex has used a range of media in different phases of his work, including line drawing [pen or pencil], acrylics, watercolour, and inktense colouring pencils - about which there is more below. 

​His journals are objects of great beauty in their own right, filled with everything from quick sketches of birds etc or schematic landscapes to be reworked later in more detail all the way to carefully composed pages such as the spread above.

So Alex has journals for sketching and also for best work. The pages shown here were selected totally at random from a vast treasure trove.
He found that Japanese Midori cotton books were excellent for working with ink and for coloured pencils.  He considers the quality of paper to be the priority, then the quality of medium, and finally the brush quality.

Alex has diversified his outlets and now also runs a YouTube channel and has written art pamphlets and, recently, a couple of books, published by David & Charles and an illustrated map guide to the Seaton-Lyme Undercliff walk.

Inktense Pencils

Inktense Pencils by Derwent are a useful medium for the plein air journaler such as Alex. This is my own [Chris Poole]'s set with basic swatch [essential!] and waterbrushes. They act like watercolour pencils except that they are made of dry acrylic ink. Once wetted and then dry the result is permanent, which is bad for correcting mistakes but great for adding glazes of colour, wet on dry. (My set of 72 can be a bit cumbersome outdoors, to be honest. The 12-set is probably versatile enough).

Alex has written the above useful pamphlet on Inktense pencils.  He explains that you can use them simply as colouring pencils. Adding water will intensify the colour but may leave texture marks on the paper [good? bad? Depends.]
Or you can wet the paper and make very vivid drawn marks.
Or [a great idea; thanks Alex!] draw on some spare card and use this as a palette, thereby getting good control over the colour and tone you will be applying to your sketch. (By the way, I sometimes draw my waterbrush across the pencil tip to get a pure colour that will be free of the texture of a pencil line)
​

An instant pallette

​Making reference swatches

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