Blue ink is totally fine - the only thing I prefer to avoid are colours that are especially bright and neon, as they become harder to assess.

Starting with your arrows, you're drawing these with a solid sense of confidence and fluidity, and you're doing a great job in compressing the gaps between the zigzagging sections and leaning into the overlaps between sections of ribbon to achieve a greater impression of depth in the scene.

That fluidity carries over fairly well into your leaves, where you've captured both how they sit statically in space, and how they move through the space they occupy. When it comes to adding edge detail to your leaves however, I am noticing a certain degree of looseness and vagueness to how you're making the marks that build upon the simple leaf structure. For example, with leaves like this one, you end up with gaps in your additions, as well as little overshoots that go past the original silhouette, with little tails poking out beyond it. This sort of thing is pretty much always going to be the result of rushing - taking a little more time to execute those marks more carefully is all it takes to avoid them, and the result of not doing so is that the constructed form with all of its holes does not feel solid and tangible. Maintaining a fully closed silhouette is important to reinforce the illusion that this structure exists in 3D space.

When you opt to work subtractively - that is, drawing the larger overall silhouette and then cutting back into it, rather than attaching new pieces to it - try to think of the marks you're drawing as though they are cuts or snips being made by a pair of scissors. You're not drawing the leaf itself - you're defining the cuts themselves, removing from the larger structure to refine its silhouette. This approach/mindset will help you avoid just trying to draw a new leaf inside of the existing structure, as you've done here.

Continuing onto your branches, I don't think you read up on the instructions for this one as closely as you should have, and as a result you're not following the steps entirely right. As explained here, your first segment should go from one ellipse, past the second, and stop halfway to the third. Then your next segment should start at the second ellipse and repeat the pattern. This results in a healthy overlap between them, which is key to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from edge to edge. There are a few places where you end up with a more significant overlap, but in most cases they appear to be very limited.

Also, you don't appear to be drawing through your ellipses - remember that as discussed back in lesson 1, you should be drawing around the ellipse's shape two full times before lifting your pen.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, as a whole you are moving in the right direction. I can see that you're paying attention to the principles of construction, working from simple to complex without jumping ahead too far in terms of complexity in most cases. There are however some things I want to recommend:

• As mentioned before, be sure to draw through all of your ellipses

• When adding edge detail to your leaves, it seems that in some cases, like the algaonema you end up zigzagging a single continuous edge back and forth instead of building individual bumps separately as explained here.

• This one isn't a big deal right now, and will be explored further in the next lesson, but when you need to change the silhouette of a structure with actual volume (like your mushrooms on this page), unfortunately just altering the silhouette no longer works, because it'll actually flatten that structure out. This is fine for leaves and petals, because they're already flat, but as shown here, when working with more volume, you need to actually attach new complete forms that wrap around the existing structure to add bulges and such to its profile.

• I can see that when you get into the detail phase of your drawings, you seem to be working without a concrete goal to guide you and to let you know when you're finished. This is because you appear to be more focused on decorating your drawings - which itself, isn't really a clear thing to aim for, because at no point do you really know how much decoration is enough. What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

• When adding cast shadows to your potato plant - especially to the leaves closer to the bottom of the drawing - you appear to be trying to stick those shadows to the silhouette of the leaves that cast them, rather than allowing them to fall whatever distance onto the ground plane below. Also, it's important that if you have some forms casting shadows, all forms should cast shadows, in order to keep things consistent.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I would like you to take another swing at the branches exercise to show that you fully understand the steps outlined for this exercise.