Drawing a sycamore leaf - 3

Hope you all are enjoying your Super Bowl Sunday!  I am taking a pause in the festivities to have a little quiet drawing time.  Sometimes, when I'm working very closely on a subject, I can't see the forest for the trees.  I am looking at something up very close and through magnifying glasses, and I get lost in the multitude of details: the impossibly crisp sharp edges, the spiderweb-like veins coursing across the surface, a little hole that an insect chewed, the subtle flip of the tip of each lobe of the leaf. . .  At this point in my drawing, I shouldn't be so concerned with every teeny detail; I am still trying to get the basic shapes and shadows worked out.  I can't help myself, though, being a down-in-the-weeds kind of gal.  I love that stuff!  I have to force myself to take breaks and sit back in my chair and take a look at the whole leaf and how it is coming along on the paper.

And today I made a really helpful discovery.  On one such break, I forgot to take off my magnifying glasses, and when I sat back in my chair, the whole drawing table became a big blur, as if I just put on someone else's specs by mistake.  Then I noticed something wonderful: it erased all the teeny details of the leaf that I'd been obsessing over, and all I could see was the basic form, the basic shadows, the darkest darks and the lightest lights.  (You get the same effect if you look at something through squinted eyes. Only the essential information gets through.) Eureka!  This is what I'm trying to draw at this stage of the game! 

Now I'm getting somewhere!  As you can see (hopefully!), this leaf is not smooth as paper but rather has a bit of a crinkle to it.  I could easily get bogged down trying to draw each plane of each crinkle, but I'm managing to keep it general.  I'm sitting back further in my chair as I draw, so my view of the leaf is suitably unfocused, and it has made all the difference!