Nature Journaling Prompt: Night Walk

Nature journaling prompt no. 8: Night walk. Take a walk in the dark to a place that is familiar to you in the daytime. What differences do you notice in the night? How does lighting from street lamps or porches illuminate the surroundings in contrast to daytime light from the sun? If there is no visible light, does the space feel wider, alien, unrecognizable, or warm and familiar?

Night Vision and Painting with Words by Brooke Weber

“We walk— I leave my Dog— at home,”  wrote Emily Dickinson, in the poem, “Again—his voice is at the door.”

My one-eyed dog doesn’t see well at night. I leave her at home for long walks in the dark. There are people who love her at the house, and I’m also not lonely. I frame pictures I want to paint in blue-scale in my head.

Darkness is not easy to capture in visual art. Painting midnight takes brain-types of a photographic bent, which I personally don’t have. Many painters, drawers, printers, etc. don’t even try—for legitimate reasons. Visual art is limited by a person’s vision, metaphorical or physical. My fraternal twin, for instance, sees almost nothing in low light. I think about my many friends who are night blind, and how, when the world fades after sunset, even artists who can see can’t count on a daylight palette to paint en plein air.

Words are more universal in the dark than vision. I’m thinking of campfire stories, tall tales, myths, songs, and poetry.

Oh, the poetry. Emily Brontë’s fierce “The night is darkening ‘round me,” Pablo Neruda’s exquisite “Tonight I can write the saddest lines;” “We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out / the trash,” writes Ada Limón in “Dead Stars”; “Barn’s burnt down / now I can see the moon,” notes Mizuta Masahide.

And Aimee Nezukumatathil wrote her collection Night Owl as a tribute to all the hours before dawn. These are just a few of my favorites, off the top of my head, but I think that the dark is a quintessential theme for perhaps every poetic repertoire. Darkness speaks to poets and they speak back.

That’s not to say that visual artists can’t capture the night.

Any glance at the night works of Hasui Kawase (Moon at Magome), to name but one artist among a great multitude, would prove that assertion a lie. Night feels more in touch with the wild than the day. The dance between the artist, all forms of their art, and nature is profound.

Still there’s an electric rush when something is said so perfectly it becomes as full of meaning as the object or moment or thing itself. Furthermore, for me, when the right words and visual art marry, the result is pure synergy—like lyrics to music. As a consequence, all of my personal artsy projects involve words—poems are illustrated, children’s picture books outlined, I’ve an ongoing take on Samantha Dion Baker’s Draw Your (Day, World, Adventure, etc.) series, and I make zines made to capture specific moments.

For this nature journaling prompt I took the chance to play with my Holbein acrylic gouache. I also added some opacity to parts of the watercolor sky with gum arabic-based Daniel Smith Titanium White gouache. Mostly though, I painted with my Da Vinci paint-filled Art Toolkit watercolor Explore Palette, and set down outlines with my Pentel Twist-Erase mechanical pencil on Canson 140 lb watercolor paper.

To quote Rainer Maria Rilke, “I believe in the night.”

—Brooke Weber

To read more about our month of nature journaling prompts, and to see the full list of prompts, click here. If you create art based on this prompt, be sure to tag your art with #NatureJournaling2026 and #ArtToolkitFridayPrompt; we love to see what you create!