So said the Victorian artist, philosopher, and teacher John Ruskin in his five-volume, Modern Painters.

How many seasons have turned since each replete with a sustenance of leaves?

You can't escape the seasons, whether you like them or not. It is customary to complain about the weather: the heat, cold, drought, rain. Learning to live in the moment of each is something we can learn from leaves.

We cheer their arrival in spring, take them for granted in summer, reluctantly let them go in autumn. And in the depths of winter, it's easy to believe nothing good and green will ever grow again. Yet the unfolding marvel comes around once more.

This gentle hyperbole from Ruskin, "If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world," reminds me that just outside the door, on a walk through my neighborhood, lies all I need for wonder. All that is exotic and distant is nothing compared to the tumult of leaf shapes, colors, and variety lying at my feet. All I need to gain the goal of seeing is encapsulated in just one leaf: form, line, texture, value, contrast, color.

One Goal Each Season

Each season I try to set myself a single creative goal.

The year I had post-concussive syndrome, my goal was extremely simple: use a fountain pen every day. Even if for a short to-do list, it made a difference and often led to a sketch or simply reveling in the pleasure of the ink.

As with the leaves, seasons of life come and go, and sometimes more is possible. Without comparing myself to the next person, I grow by accepting the season—whether of the year, or of my life.

This fall I am again focused on health and the need to remedy a long-standing issue, which thankfully even today is meeting its match with a feisty new doctor. Limitations have again focused my creative intentions so that creating does not disappear altogether.

Having recently completed Michael Nobbs' course, Resurrecting a Creative Project, my one thing is to faithfully write to you, dear reader, each week.

However, in this my twentieth year of homeschooling, I am also venturing back into the world of nature journaling, walking weekly with my youngest, and taking our sketchbooks along.

Good for both body and soul.

I confess this is something I say I do, or think I do, but rarely get around to doing. Helped by the exhortation of Ruskin, the teaching of John Muir Laws, and a homeschool-authored how-to book, we have had some success in actually going.

No Need to Tackle the Whole Landscape

What encourages me most about the leaf quote is that one leaf is enough. When you look at a whole landscape, it can be overwhelming. It has helped my daughter to begin a forbidding blank page, knowing she can just tackle a leaf or two and build from there.

Debora Missoorten, an artist from Belgium, and a Paperblogging reader, used the leaves in her garden recently as an opportunity to study color, and she kindly shares several pages with you from her sketchbook.

You can see more of her artwork at her site, The Quiet Painter.

In the meantime, as the storms of the fall fell the bulk of the leaves, we scramble to save some and enjoy their brief glory.

Herfstbladeren, leaf color study from the sketchbook of Debora Missoorten, 2017 — *Herfstbladeren*, sketchbook leaf color study, Debora Missoorten, 2017 [click to enlarge]

Herfstbladeren 2, Debora Missoorten, 2017 (Click to enlarge) — *Herfstbladeren 2,* Debora Missoorten, 2017 [Click to enlarge]

Resources That Teach and Inspire

"Fast sketch of withered oak", watercolor, bodycolor and ink, 14 x 18 cm, The Ruskin Gallery, Guild of St. George Collection Date 1879 (Click to enlarge)

Ruskin was a man of his word. His leaf studies abound. He collected examples of art prints, his own and those of famous works, for the students of his Art School in Oxford. He intended the school not for future artists by for ordinary men and women to learn to see the wonders of nature for themselves.