Any tips for improving my *sketches* of trees? Trying to get better at visualizing what something will be made into :)

[SU2]

Hoping for any&all help to improve my sketchings, last weekend was my local bonsai club's monthly meeting and they booked Adam Levine again so of course I went (the only 3 times I've gone are when he's been..need to go 'just because' sometime!) and someone (Adam or one of the people running it I think, could be wrong) had "John Naka's Sketchbook" a published collection of his drawings and it made me realize just how poorly I'm conceptualizing trees' future development so here I am I'm figuring the smartest thing for me to do is to stop sketching my ideas/predictions of what I'd do to one of my trees, and begin instead just copying others' works, literally just using page-after-page in my sketchbook to try and accurately copy pictures from Naka's sketchbook, google-results, stuff like that!

Thanks for any advice on this, I'm not bad at drawing "in general" I actually was quite the serious drawer/artist along comic-book lines half a lifetime ago when in my teens, I know I can resummon it but my only idea for speeding that up is to simply copy others' pics until I feel better about the sketches I'm making for my trees, any other avenues to improve would be greatly appreciated am looking out at a garden that needs a lot of styling work and don't have sketches or plans for a majority of my specimen :/

 

[AZbonsai]

No idea! I am artistically challenged, however, I do seem to remember this class being offered.

 

[Anthony]

Simple start with Al's [ @Smoke ] approach.

Then draw trees you like. Come back and show the efforts here.
Good Day
Anthony

 

[Wires_Guy_wires]

After someone told me to only sketch hard outlines, not putting them down as solid lines, as well as using only shadows, my portrait drawings improved every single time.
If all things fail, go with acryllic paint and use colors. I'm not kidding. It works. I don't know how or why, but I can paint faces better than I draw them.

 

[Maloghurst]

Hoping for any&all help to improve my sketchings, last weekend was my local bonsai club's monthly meeting and they booked Adam Levine again so of course I went (the only 3 times I've gone are when he's been..need to go 'just because' sometime!) and someone (Adam or one of the people running it I think, could be wrong) had "John Naka's Sketchbook" a published collection of his drawings and it made me realize just how poorly I'm conceptualizing trees' future development so here I am I'm figuring the smartest thing for me to do is to stop sketching my ideas/predictions of what I'd do to one of my trees, and begin instead just copying others' works, literally just using page-after-page in my sketchbook to try and accurately copy pictures from Naka's sketchbook, google-results, stuff like that!

Thanks for any advice on this, I'm not bad at drawing "in general" I actually was quite the serious drawer/artist along comic-book lines half a lifetime ago when in my teens, I know I can resummon it but my only idea for speeding that up is to simply copy others' pics until I feel better about the sketches I'm making for my trees, any other avenues to improve would be greatly appreciated am looking out at a garden that needs a lot of styling work and don't have sketches or plans for a majority of my specimen :/

As with all art forms you need practice. Just draw a tree everyday. Draw real trees as well and a year from now you will be pretty good.