I’ve come to realize that trees do not lend themselves well to accurate sketches (without spending an undue amount of time on them, that is). For even if you’re looking straight at the thing during the moments when you’re not bent over your sketch pad, the only mental notes you can ever take back to your drawing hand are things like: “The edge kind of gets really wiggly about here… and then there’s that lumpy darkish bit below the squiggly mottled lightish bit just to the right of that extension with the blots of leafiness at odd intervals.”

And so you sort of improvise within the confines of that general description, until you end up with something that does, in fact, look like a tree, and would probably even have a similar shape as the subject. Though if the tree ever managed to get a good look at its supposed portrait, it would probably give you a fairly condescending bit of glowering and stomp off in a huff.

Leaving you to wonder how in the world it had just done that.