There’s something quietly radical about making art from nothing.
My accordion nature journal has exactly one rule: everything that goes into it must either be free or come from my existing stash. No shopping. No new supplies. Just the beautiful, chaotic wealth of materials I’ve already collected over years of making.
This page started — as so many do — with paint. A bold, unapologetic chartreuse green that I layered and scraped across the cardboard base until it had texture and life. Underneath it, you can still feel the history of the surface — corrugated cardboard, telephone directory pages, the ghost of something that used to be something else.
What went into this page:
- Acrylic paint — greens, yellows, a strip of deep red-brown at the base
- Vintage die-cut flowers (from my stash — those beautiful, slightly faded botanical prints)
- Stabilo All pencil for outlining and detail
- A strip of my own handmade paper
- Stamped word fragments forming the Rilke quote
The Rilke quote was cut from one of my printed quote sheets — I keep full pages of favourite quotes printed out, ready to cut up. This one came on a beautifully dyed paper (how did I dye it? genuinely no idea, and that’s very on-brand for a stash that’s been accumulating for years). The words were cut apart and placed individually across the green ground, which gives that lovely staggered, found-poem feeling. It felt right the moment it landed — something about the handmade, the organic, the found — it all pointed back to that line.
The flowers are vintage die cuts I’ve been saving. I love how they sit against the painted background — illustrative and a little old-fashioned, like something pressed from a grandmother’s garden book. The vase is drawn directly onto the surface with Stabilo All, first painted and then collaged a piece of my own handmade paper.
This isn’t a nature journal in the classical sense — no careful botanical studies, no field sketches. It’s more of a feeling about nature. About cycles and free things and the kind of abundance you find when you stop buying and start looking at what you already have.
More pages to come, but for now enjoy the video down below
