In my blog post on the value of notebooks, I write about how learning to draw makes us smarter:

Our brains love to be challenged, and the more you push yourself by putting pencil or pen to paper, the more glial cells and myelin protein are produced in the brain, which makes you remember and improves your skills. So it’s true:

Drawing makes us smarter!

There is also no better way to learn about something than to study it in order to draw it. To closely observe the shape, the texture, the colors of a desert tortoise is to know a desert tortoise. After you spend two hours studying and drawing one, you will be changed.

This spring we are offering you the chance to feed your brain and get to know the desert creatures on Tumamoc Hill just west of downtown Tucson. Drawing Skills for Field Notebooks is offered by the University of Arizona’s historic Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill and will be every Saturday morning from March 7 through April 25. You can take them all for a discount, or choose just a few.

We’ll have live reptiles, a desert hawk, some extinct mammals, a lot of weird plants, beautiful beetles, and more. Each session includes an expert scientist sharing ecology of the topic, followed by art instruction by Tumamoc’s art team.

For information and to register, visit https://tumamoc.arizona.edu/art-and-science/course