To your question, the thing to keep in mind is that everything in this course is an exercise. When it comes to the branches themselves, think of your approach as follows: get used to what is involved in the technique at a larger scale, where those branches can be wider and the ellipses can be larger, using our whole arm from the shoulder and the ghosting method to draw each mark - then as you get comfortable with that, your drawings will gradually demand less room, and you'll get more comfortable scaling them down. But one thing at a time. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. In artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

Ultimately, the expectation is that there will be things that are difficult right now - constructing skinny tubes, drawing smaller ellipses from the shoulder, etc. But as long as you adhere to the instructions here, which ensure that you're using the correct approaches for the purposes of each exercise, those things will become more manageable as you progress and practice. What you should avoid however is changing the approach because it does not yield an immediately favorable result right now.

Anyway, jumping in with your arrows, you're doing a great job pushing the sense of confidence behind these marks, which really helps to sell the fluidity with which they move through the world. This carries over very nicely into your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they individually sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the pace they occupy.

Overall your addition of edge detail is moving in the right direction in a number of cases, but at best it does still tend to be kind of sloppy, where you're visibly not taking enough time to put down each individual "bump" as its own separate mark, but rather end up putting those marks down more quickly. This results in issues like zigzagging marks back and forth, which we can see in a few different ways:

• Here where you're just not quite as conscious of where each mark starts and ends, and end up at times incorporating multiple bumps into a single stroke

• and here where you end up treating each phase of construction more as a loose suggestion, rather than some solid structure that you're building onto directly.

Additionally, for your adean diploid potato leaf, you seem to have skipped the earlier stage of laying down the overall footprint of the structure as a whole. Be sure not to skip any steps.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is generally good, although you do need to be more mindful of how far you extend each edge segment. As shown here, each one needs to go from one ellipse, past the second, and stop halfway to the third, with the next segment starting at the second ellipse and repeating the pattern. This allows for a healthy overlap between them, which in turn results in a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next.

And finally, looking at your plant constructions, overall you're doing a pretty good job, although I can definitely see areas where you just tend to be kind of sloppy. It's nothing critical, but the points I raised in regards to the previous exercises are certainly present here - and in the case of the branches exercise, where in the dedicated exercise you followed the steps correctly more often than you didn't, here if we look at cases like your pitcher plant, you deviate more from the branch exercise instructions.

Secondly, another point to keep an eye on is about the relationships between the phases of construction. Zigzagging edge detail's a problem because it results in a weak relationships between those phases, which makes less of the solidity of the earlier, simpler structure (which appear more solid because of the fact that they're simpler) transfer forward as we build up more complexity. This also comes up in other ways - for example, leaving arbitrary gaps between the end of a petal or leaf's flow line, and the petal/leaf's own tip. For example, if you look at this hibiscus drawing, you started out with an ellipse to establish how far out the petals would extend. You then drew your flow lines such that they ended roughly at the perimeter of the ellipse. There are a few discrepancies, a bit of overshooting, which does weaken this relationship but overall it's pretty good. Then, when you drew the petals themselves, you included an arbitrary gap between the end of the flow line and the end of the petal. Instead, those petals should have ended with their tips right where the flow line ended as well, in order to allow that structure to carry its solidity forward as efficiently as possible.

Thirdly, a couple points about flower pots:

• If you're dealing with a cylindrical flower pot, be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line, to help you in aligning your various ellipses.

• Also, be sure to include as much as is needed to establish the main points of the structure - so don't just stick to a basic cylinder, but also include another ellipse inset within the opening to establish the thickness of the rim, and even another to establish the level of the soil so there's a clear structure with which the plant's stem can intersect.

• Don't leave the structure open-ended if it gets cut off the side of the page. Cap it off - in the case of a cylindrical flower pot like this one. This will reinforce the fact that we're looking at a solid, 3D structure, rather than just a flat shape on a page.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I would like you to do one more page of leaves, specifically focusing on how you build up edge detail. To give you one additional example, compare how you approached this monstera-type leaf to how I demonstrate my approach in this demo.