I don’t always get to finish a sketch in one sitting. When I know time is short, I’ll take the camera with me and get a photo to use when I finish the sketch later.

Here’s the photo of the subject for the current sketch-in-progress. I used this photo for the cover of my new Wild Ozark Musings zine-letter, which is available free to subscribers.

And here’s the sketch so far. I’ve only drawn the outlines. Next I’ll begin shading and add color to the seedling. I went ahead and wrote the entry so I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to record about the experience. I don’t always include *every* element to a scene. In this one, I left out the little bit of grass and of course all the pebbles aren’t accounted for.

And here’s the finished sketch. This is not one of my favorites. It turned out to be very difficult to get the texture of the down-covered leaves right. The color was an issue too, but it came out closer than I thought it would. And you’ll see that I smudged it up a lot while doing the rocks.

I’d rate this one better than the mushroom, but not nearly as good as the two sweetgum leaves.