No worries! It does look like you submitted this to the community yesterday without checking the "submit for official critique" option, but I'm glad you realized the issue.

Overall, you've done a pretty good job. I'll try and go through each page and answer your questions.

Starting with your arrows, these are flowing quite confidently through space, though I am noticing that you're pointedly avoiding having the zigzagging sections overlap one another as they get farther away. You are having those sections continue to compress more and more, so you're not technically doing anything wrong here, but you are avoiding certain orientations. Don't hesitate to let those sections overlap, as it's a great way to really convey the full depth of the scene.

Moving onto your leaves exercise, you're doing a good job of carrying over the same sense of energy and fluidity from your arrows into this exercise. Often students will stiffen up since this is technically the first time they're drawing something real and tangible, and they'll focus overmuch on establishing how it exists statically within space. Instead, you've done a good job of capturing how each leaf moves through the space if occupies, which goes one step further. I can also see that you're doing a good job of adhering closely to the existing structure whenever adding additional complexity - like when you add further edge detail, it always rises off and returns to the simpler edge from the previous phase of construction. Very well done.

The one other thing I did want to call out here is that when it comes to detail/texture, you've got a bit of a mixed bag with these leaves. Along the left side of the page you tend to focus more on capturing the shadows the little surface forms cast - like you're thinking about the shadows on either side of the leaves' veins, whic his great. But along the right side of the page, you slip back into treating the veins as though they're just lines. This is incorrect - always go with how you did things on the left side, focusing on the shadows cast by the forms and not simply drawing lines.

Moving onto your branches, you're doing a pretty good job with these, but there are a couple little issues I'd like to point out:

• Make sure you extend your segments fully halfway towards the next ellipse. I noticed that you have a tendency to stop your segments just a little past the previous ellipse. By going halfway towards the next one, it gives us a good bit of runway to overlap directly with the next segment before shooting off towards the next target, which in turn helps the segments blend together more seamlessly, giving the impression that they're a single continuous stroke.

• You're not doing too badly with this, but try and keep your branches consistent in their width throughout their lengths. That means avoiding situations where they get narrower or wider, just sticking to the same width wherever possible.

So! Onto your plant constructions. Since you have explicit questions, I'm going to spend most of my time answering them, but if I see anything important that I haven't yet touched upon that I need to call out, I'll do so.

Starting with your potato plant, you ask how do you know which leaves to draw, and which leaves not to draw. In this particular case, since the potato plant as a whole is the focus of our drawing, we would draw each and every leaf. I actually chose this plant for this demo specifically because it forces us to face the fact that sometimes you can't get away with only drawing some parts - sometimes we really do just have to tough through it and draw each and every leaf (or at least as many as we can manage). You've done a good job of that, though since the drawing obviously gets pretty heavy with overlapping leaves, using shadows cast from some leaves onto others would definitely help to make the drawing easier for the viewer to understand at a glance.

Now, your question does relate back to what we talked about in lesson 2's texture section. That is, when drawing textures, we work impicitly (drawing the shadows our textural forms cast, rather than employing more explicit constructional techniques as we did here with this potato plant). This allows us to control exactly what we want to draw, leaving certain areas to be filled in by the viewer's brain. There are absolutely circumstances where you'll have a texture that is just made up by a bunch of leaves piling on top of each other - like if we had leaves laying scattered on the surface of the ground, or if we had leaves bunched up in treetops. In this case, the leaves themselves follow the surface of a larger mass.

In this potato plant drawing however, each leaf is the subject of our drawing, they're independent, freefloating forms that we're establishing in space, and so we have to approach them in an explicit fashion.

On your next plant, you ask a very similar question - again, you would draw every single leaf (or at least the vast majority of them). You did ask however how to avoid making them a cluttered mess - once all the leaves are drawn, you can then go back in and capture shadows they'd cast onto one another to help separate out your forms. This will cause your front-most leaves to stand out against those in the back, which themselves would recede and draw the eye a lot less. That's what you see me doing here in the last stage of the potato plant demo. Compared to this earlier step, it's a lot easier for the viewer to parse.

For your hibiscus, you asked "why does this look flat to me?". I'm actually not sure if that's a question you wanted me to answer, but to start, it doesn't actually look particularly flat to me. That said, different peoples' eyes will process things a little differently. One thing that can potentially make things look a little flatter is where line weight starts to get more obviously thick. The thicker the line weight gets, the more we get a sort of "graphic" look, where a 3D form is being outlined really obviously, which reminds us that we're looking at something two dimensional (since things don't have outlines in the real world). That's why the difference between cast shadows and line weight is important - line weight's useful but should always be kept really subtle, like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious where it's just barely noticing that one line is slightly heavier than another. Cast shadow is where we want to push things further - but the key difference is that cast shadows don't stick to the silhouette of the form casting it. Cast shadows fall onto another surface, and run along that surface, matching however it curves and warps through space. This detachment avoids us from mixing it up with line weight.

Again, I felt the hibiscus wasn't particularly flat, but there are some areas where the line weight gets a little thick (maybe you were trying to draw cast shadows but accidentally had it sticking to the silhouette of the form casting it), and so your eyes may have felt that it was flattening out.

Skipping a little further down, you ask "how do you figure out what the main ones are?" - now this sounds similar to the previous questions, but it's actually a little different. Ultimately, you're in charge. While these drawings are not intended to be pieces of art and therefore we're not terribly interested in composition and all that (they're just exercises for understanding how to break objects down into simpler forms, and to build them back up, understanding how those forms relate to one another in 3D space), if we WERE to draw them as an actual piece you wanted to pin to your fridge (so to speak), then you're the one who gets to decide which flower is your "focal point".

It's less about there being a "main" flower, and more about a certain region of your drawing being where you want to concentrate all the detail and texture to draw the eye in towards that area. As you radiate out from it, you'll gradually decrease the density of information. It is ultimately left to you to know where you want that focal point to be early on in your drawing. One way my own instructor taught us to think about it was to actually draw a literal circle on the page to remind ourselves, "this is where we're packing in all our detail". You can see an example of this from these sketches of his. Now, in Drawabox we're not concerned with detail and presentation and all that - we're purely stripping down just to focus on understanding the spatial relationships between our forms, so I try not to have students go down this particular route just now.

Now, all in all you're doing a pretty great job employing and applying the principles covered in the lesson. Most of your drawings come out feeling very strong, with a great sense of flow in the leaves and petals, and an excellent sense of solidity in things like your mushrooms. Just a couple things:

• There were a couple places where your leaves/petals felt just a little more stiff. For example, this page, and to a lesser extent, this one. One thing that can help to remind yourself to always push the energy and flow of that first line of your leaf construction process is to add a little arrowhead on the end of that first flow line. It's a silly little trick that has always helped remind me of the arrow exercise - when drawing an arrow, it's easier to think about the energy of the forces that push these leaves and petals around, rather than worrying about everything else that goes into such a form. With the flow line properly in place, we can then construct the form around it, maintaining its greater sense of fluidity.

• A really minor point, but while these mushrooms have excellent structure, you are getting carried away with your ellipses. Remember that you should only draw through them 2-3 times, ideally just 2. Any more than that and you start to lose track of which specific ellipse you're trying to draw on the page. You can absolutely go around them all you want while ghosting through the stroke beforehand, but once the pen touches the page, try just to go around twice before lifting your pen.

So! With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.