Many cyclotourists, distance hikers, and paddlers keep a journal, and some go further, embellishing their journal entries with quick pencil sketches. It’s not hard to see why. A journal serves to reawaken slumbering memories. It’s also a useful resource for trip planning. Sometimes pictures really are worth a thousand words. Moreover, pencils are cheap tools. But they’re not perfect, are they? As we saw last month, the ordinary lead pencil has its limitations.

The visible world is a many-colored tapestry, unfolding before us as we paddle, and graphite gray frequently fails to do justice to what we see. Colored pencils are one way around this shortcoming. Yet they, too, have their limitations. They don’t do a very good job of capturing the radiant brilliance of reflections in the mirror-like surface of a mountain pool. And they’re not always equal to the task of matching the smoldering intensities of autumn hills and tropical sunsets. For jobs like these, you really need watercolors. Does this sound like something for an artist’s studio? It’s not. While most folks associate watercolors with the work of, say, J.M.W. Turner or Winslow Homer, watercolor was also the tool of choice for many early explorers and naturalists. Though their hasty field sketches were usually redrafted for publication, you can get some idea of their scope from the journals of surgeon-naturalist Sir John Richardson and the unfortunate midshipmen Robert Hood [Warning! PDF]. Their work documented everything from botanical discoveries to the profiles of complex arctic coastlines, and it was all done in the field, often in haste and always under less than ideal conditions.

The good news? What worked for 19th-century explorers can work for 21st-century trekkers, too…Read more…

 
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