ALTAI™ Pro Tip: Sketch Your Way To Becoming A Better Hunter
Today’s blog post is brought to you by our fabulous blogger and outdoor guru, Katlyn Spade.
Tracking animals and landing a kill requires a creative mindset, but 78% of workers feel they lack creative abilities. One way to improve your hunting is by honing this skill, so consider combining the hunt with a creative activity like drawing. You may already impose certain obstacles, such as limiting your weapons, to make the hobby even more fulfilling, but by adding the act of drawing into your hunting trip, you can increase your performance. Here’s how sketching can take your enjoyment of hunting to the next level.
Calming Your Pre-Hunt Nerves
When you’re sketching your environment, you’re forced to take the time to examine it more closely. This is actually a form of mindfulness meditation. You are becoming more present and in tune with the world around you, leaving you feeling calm. Hunters can be negatively affected by feelings of anxiety or anger, so using drawing as a form of meditation can calm your nerves and increase your chances of landing a kill. It doesn’t matter how good your drawings are. This part of the sketching process is more about observation than creating art. Rather than trying to draw what you think something looks like, closely observe the subject and draw what it really looks like. You will then be able to feel a sense of focus and calm so that you can respond quickly and effectively when there is something to hunt.
Forming Deeper Bonds With Nature
Many people hunt because they love being out in the wild and feeling like a part of the ecosystem. However, as humans it’s easy to feel disconnected from all that. Spending time drawing the plants and animals you find helps you to feel more connected to them. By being in tune with wildlife, your prey becomes more predictable, and you will be more likely to land a kill. If you’re not a confident artist, begin with basic shape outlines of birds or animals before adding the detail. If you’re drawing a bird then you’ll have to make yourself still and quiet so as not to scare it off while you add the finer details. Ordinarily, the bird would be alerted to your presence and would flee, allowing you no opportunity for connection. With a sketch pad in hand, you will get to know wildlife more closely through observation. More importantly, however, you are becoming more efficient at stalking and tracking your prey without them noticing.
Enhance Cognitive Capabilities
There is another benefit to performing creative tasks while out hunting. Drawing or sketching will actually improve your performance in this sport. This is because it keeps your mind stimulated so that your cognitive performance improves, and you can bring home more impressive kills. Firstly, sketching requires patience and focus, which are both essential to a successful hunt. Secondly, it is creative so it uses a different part of the brain to solve problems. This means that when you head out into the woods, you will be able to come up with more original and effective hunting techniques.
Hunting and sketching may not be an obvious combination, but it makes sense when you think about it. You are surrounded by beautiful countryside, so why not capture it? Doing so will help you to become a better hunter by calming down nerves or anger, while also being less likely to disturb prey and improving your cognitive performance. Creative hunters have more original techniques, along with the focus required for a successful hunt.
Crank Up The Cardio
Don’t Forget Your Lower Body
Before we can discover our true selves, we must first take a journey across uneven ground, up steep mountains, and over rocky hills. Only then, will we be able to realize who we are because of the trials that formed us and the choices we made along the way.
Seventeen hours on a plane, nearly ten thousand miles later, I landed at the Port Elizabeth airport in South Africa, experiencing my first African safari at the age of twenty. I knew that every choice I made led me to this opportunity, and they could have just as easily led me somewhere else. My journey to find myself was not an easy one. I fell many times along the way, got tired and worn out, sometimes the view wasn’t great, but when I finally made it, I could stand up, look back at what I had accomplished, and smile. It was in South Africa that I reached my summit and figured out where I belonged. It was in South Africa that I found the strength in me to make the decision to pack my bags the moment I landed in New York and head out west, back to where I grew up. I didn’t know what school I would end up at, what town I would call home, or if I would know anyone when I got there, but what I did know, was that I was excited to find out.
