The Sketchbook Was Her Microscope

There’s something quietly radical about a sketchbook. A piece of charcoal. A moment of stillness in front of a leaf, a shell, a cell. Long before women were handed credentials or lab coats, they picked up pencils. They turned to sketching not as a gentle pastime, but as a fierce form of observation — a tool of investigation. From 17th-century botanical studies to colonial field journals, women used illustration to document, interpret, and claim space in the scientific world. This was not leisure. This was knowledge-building.

From Maria Sibylla Merian’s insect metamorphosis watercolours in the 1600s to Elizabeth Gould’s hand-painted ornithological plates in the 1800s, women’s drawings laid the foundation for many male-dominated scientific fields. Yet their contributions were often buried under the names of fathers, husbands, institutions. They weren’t seen as discoverers — just helpers with pretty handwriting. But make no mistake: the drawings themselves were rigorous, layered, technical, and time-consuming. They were experiments in observation. Data in pigment.

The dominant narrative has long positioned science and art as opposites: one empirical, the other emotional. One masculine, the other feminine. That story split the atom of creativity — and in doing so, cut many women off from being seen as legitimate knowledge producers. While men built the lab, women sketched in the margins. While men got published, women’s illustrations were archived without attribution. And while men were credited with discovery, women were too often dismissed as decorative.

The Creative Women’s Association (CWA) refuses to let those pages stay closed. It recognises that the act of sketching — especially in nature, in community, or in solitude — is not passive. It’s investigative. It’s embodied. It’s work. Through its category Scientific Illustration & Sketches, CWA is creating a new home for this hybrid form — where women’s intellectual curiosity is no longer separate from their creative drive. It’s not about nostalgia, and it’s definitely not about permission. It’s about resilience. About starting something — and finishing it. About coming back to the page after failure, after silence, after disinterest and distraction. And sketching again.

This work is emotional, physical, and practical. It’s showing up to the page even when the inner critic is loud. It’s tracing, redrawing, observing, pausing. It’s making 99 “mistakes” and still seeing the 100th version as possibility. It’s learning from the line that wobbled. It’s mapping the detail others miss. In this reframe, the sketchbook becomes more than a place for ideas — it’s a place for endurance, process, and self-trust.

Across cultures and generations, women have used drawing as a way to make sense of their world. In Aboriginal traditions, drawing in the sand is a form of knowledge-sharing — a living archive where each mark connects land, body, and story. These visual languages hold more than illustration; they hold law, science, memory, and cosmology. Just as these marks were never just “art,” neither were the illustrations by Victorian-era women sketching the reproductive cycles of plants, or early 20th-century women documenting marine ecosystems.

In all these examples, drawing was communication. Observation. Analysis. Not just beauty, but structure. Today, we have the chance to reclaim that. To look again at these practices — not as hobbies or footnotes — but as valid, credible, deeply intelligent methods of engaging with the world.

At CWA, scientific illustration isn’t reserved for professionals. It’s a democratic practice. If you can hold a pencil, you can begin. And beginning is everything. Because the best poem hasn’t been written. The best sketch hasn’t been made. The best discovery still lives inside someone’s journal, tucked between grocery lists and unfinished dreams. If we give up before we start — or worse, if we stop just short of completion — we might never know what was possible.

This is not about getting it right. It’s about getting it down. It’s about holding the tension of uncertainty and still moving your hand. It’s about witnessing the world, slowly. And letting that witnessing turn into wisdom — one line at a time.