The thing is, it's real fun to draw wood, and it comes out pretty great. Again, I have a long long way to go before I am tricking the viewer into thinking my drawings are photographs, but I like how satisfying and relatively simple it is to draw wood grain.

Here's a wood panel I drew last year:

And here is the one I drew today:

I'm not sure that today's wood is better than last year's wood. In fact, I think it's entirely possible that last year's was better. But the thing is, wood is just fun, and both of them are clearly meant to be wood. 

Here's bonus wood: a barrel I drew last year:

Something weird happening to the aspect ratio in the draft version - the original drawing is taller and narrower. In the preview version, both the second and the third photos are rotated 90 degrees from the direction of the original images. Not sure why uploading photos to blog posts is so unreliable. Doom. Still, maybe it will come out right in the final version. 

Bonus wood!