You're definitely right, that the confidence of a stroke is paramount - and that's something that was demonstrated quite well throughout the arrows exercise, where it helped you establish how each one moves fluidly through space.

That is something that wasn't quite as present in your leaves, where I feel you may have allowed the fact that you're drawing something real and tangible to cause you to stiffen up somewhat. One thing I do to help me loosen up with these is to add a little arrow-head at the end of the flow line in the first step of the leaf constructions. This helps me create a connection in my brain between how I would draw in the arrows exercise and how I wish to draw here, allowing me to focus more on how that central flow line serves a specific purpose: to capture how that leaf actually moves through space.

When it comes to adding edge detail, I noticed that while you did show in a number of places that you were trying to build onto the existing structure from the previous phase of construction, there were a lot of places where you were taking too much liberty with just how much more complexity you were wlling to add. For example, with here those bumps weren't really being built upon any kind of an existing structure, instead they would stop at some arbitrary point, then start a new bump. That's definitely somewhere you should have built up from a previous stage.

Similarly, you handled the more complex edge detail properly on this one, but it was the initial silhouette you constructed (step 2 of the leaf construction process) where you went way too complex, way too soon. There are a few different ways in which a leaf like this could have been tackled, either as a regular leaf, just starting with a very simple silhouette, then in several successive phases of construction, building up more complexity (as shown here on another student's work), or you could have approached it as a more complex leaf structure as shown here, constructing each individual "arm" as its own separate leaf.

As a whole, you are moving in the right direction here, but there are definitely areas where you could have held to the principles of construction more closely.

Continuing onto your branches, these are for the most part fairly well done, but there's one thing I wanted to call out. Make sure you're extending your edge segments fully halfway to the next ellipse. As explained here, this helps us achieve a healthier overlap between them, which in turn allows for a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. It also helps in this regard to use the previous segment as a runway, overlapping its last chunk directly instead of drawing where that stroke ought to have been (in the case of mistakes). This will make it a little more difficult, but by directly dealing with those mistakes, we learn from them more effectively.

As a whole, I am quite pleased with how you've tackled your plant constructions. Here you are holding to the principles of construction better than you did with your leaves (working from simple to complex), although I did notice that in cases where you end up dealing with a lot of leaves in a single drawing, they tend to be a little more rushed, like in this page. This is a common issue students run into, where they'll determine how much time they put into a single stroke based on how many lines they're expected to draw. Of course, it doesn't work like that - we always ensure we execute our marks to the best of our current ability, investing however much time as is needed to allow us to do so.

In a case like this however, I do want to remind you that you don't actually have to reproduce the entirety of whatever is visible in a given reference image. There are often cases where a plant features the same kind of structure repeated in multiple areas - in such a case, you can of course just focus on a certain section. Doing so will allow you to explore that section at a larger scale on the page, giving your brain more room to think through spatial problems, and making it easier for you to engage your whole arm while drawing.

One last thing - when it comes down to using line weight, I can see you using it somewhat arbitrarily. Remember that line weight is a tool with a specific purpose - we use it to clarify how forms overlap in specific, localized areas, using the ghosting method to execute those marks with confidence rather than trying to cover excessive amounts of a silhouette's edge. You can see an example of this here.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I am going to assign some minimal revisions. Remember that you should not be moving onto the next lesson before you have the previous one marked as complete, as discussed back in lesson 0's explanation of how the official critique system works.