Starting with your arrows, these are coming along alright, although they are somewhat erratic in their execution, with seemingly arbitrary widening/narrowing of the ribbon that throws off the illusion that the ribbon is a consistent width, moving away from the viewer. In general, the linework here does seem a little rushed - make sure that you're applying the ghosting method and executing these from your arm to achieve a nice, smooth stroke. Try to minimize hesitation, and just let your arm do what it does best. The irregularities do generally line up with what we see when a student falls back to drawing more from their elbow, so keep an eye on that.

Continuing onto your leaves, I really do feel like you have the capacity to do this just fine, but that you're focusing your energy, attention and time more on the detail towards the end, rather than the earlier steps. It's the earlier steps - that is, executing the flow lines, and establishing that early silhouette - that matter most. These first few steps lay down the foundation upon which the structure is drawn, so ensuring that the flow lines appropriately convey the manner in which the leaf is moving through space (using the ghosting method and executing from the shoulder), and so on. In general, the impression I'm getting here is that you still need to invest more time into each individual stroke, thinking about what each one is meant to accomplish on an individual basis.

Keep in mind that every drawing here is an exercise, and that every stroke will demand a certain amount of time from you to be done well. It's easy to get caught up in the sense that "I only have X minutes for this sitting", and to try and assign yourself a certain amount of time to accomplish the task. That's what leads to rushing - instead, you allow the task to determine how much time it demands of you, and if that means breaking a page or even a single drawing across multiple sittings, that's what you're required to do.

Lastly, I noticed that when you do get into the detail phase here, you appear to be more focused on a general sense of "decorating" your drawings - that is, doing what you can to make them more interesting and attractive to look at. 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.

So when it comes to texture, we are focusing on the physical three dimensional forms that are present on the object's surface, and on implying their presence through the use of specific, intentionally designed cast shadow shapes. You can see an example of this in the leaf exercise instructions diagram, where the veins along the leaves' surface are just tubes which are being implied by strategically placed shadow shapes. Each shadow shape is designed based on understanding the nature of the tube itself, and its relationship with the existing surface - they're not drawn arbtirarily. Furthermore, it's best to lean towards less of these textural marks, rather than more - just focus on capturing the bare minimum that gets the idea across.

Moving onto the branches, your work here is coming along fairly well. I do have a few things for you to focus on as you move forwards on this:

• Make sure that you extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse. You do this much of the time, but there are cases - especially where you reach bends in the structure - where you fall short. This is important in terms of achieving a smoother, more seamless transition, which we establish by having the segments overlap one another as shown here.

• Also as shown in that diagram, it's best to try to overlap the last chunk of the previous segment directly, using it as a runway instead of drawing your next mark where the previous one ought to have been (in the case of having made a mistake). Forcing yourself to deal with those mistakes will help you learn from them more directly.

• Right now you're drawing a bunch of ellipses with the same degree. Remember that as described in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, as we slide along the length of a cylindrical form, the ellipses will shift in their degree, getting wider as we move away from the viewer.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, these are moving in the right direction for the most part. The issues I raised for the previous two exercises are certainly present here, though I am seeing some improvement. I do feel you're taking some more time with the execution of your linework, but there are still a few points I want to raise:

• To answer your question about the potato plant right up front, your assumption there is incorrect. I am not filling the negative space between the leaves. At least, that's not the driving motivation for the result. All the filled black shapes should be reserved for cast shadows, and that is precisely what they are here as well - the camera angle has us looking straight through the leaves onto the ground below, and that ground is covered densely enough by the foliage to be fully filled in with shadows. While this isn't clear at this step, once we add the cast shadows for the other leaves as shown here it gives enough contextual information to show that the space in question is indeed simply covered in shadow.

• So, to that point, think of filled black shapes as being a tool with a specific purpose - to convey cast shadows, and in doing so, imply the presence of other forms (be they large constructed forms or smaller textural forms). In the case of your shimeji mushrooms for example, you should not be filling the inside of the base/pot with black, because that filled shape does not directly relate to any existing form.

• Line weight should similarly be treated as a tool with a specific purpose - the purpose of clarifying how specific forms overlap one another in particular localized areas. Don't go out of your way to just reinforce the silhouettes of your forms, as this will create a lot of arbitrary noise. Any area where two lines cross of equal weight one another can be seen kind of as an intersection of roads. When the eye enters through one road, it can take any of the other three to continue on its journey. That ambiguity should be avoided - instead, we use line weight to take one of those lines and lift it up over the previous one, creating a sort of "overpass" where the eye cannot jump from one path to the other. You can see an example of this in these two overlapping leaves. In general, keep your phases of construction consistent in their line weight, and then you can go back over your drawing to find these kinds of key overlaps to clarify with a subtle application of line weight.

• When adding texture, always remember that it comes back to implying the presence of little forms that exist on the surface of our objects. I noticed that you've got a lot of cases where you're putting one-off strokes as textural marks - one recommendation I have is to purposefully force yourself to draw all your textural marks as shadow shapes (so first outlining the given shadow shape, then filling it in). As shown here, this can help you achieve more dynamic, purposeful marks, and will help you avoid the temptation of just painting them off in one go, which can often be less thought out.

• When drawing flower pots - specifically cylindrical ones - be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line to help you keep your ellipses aligned to one another. Furthermore, do not limit yourself to just two ellipses and a basic cylinder. Add as many ellipses as are needed to flesh out the structure of the pot. A good start is adding a smaller ellipse inset within the opening to create the thickness of its rim. Sometimes students feel that the flower pot is not an important part of the lesson - this is incorrect. All we're doing here, from Lesson 3-7, is looking at the same problem of construction and spatial reasoning from many different lenses. Whatever we're drawing should be drawn in full, given as much time as it needs, without exception. This lesson is not about learning how to draw plants in particular. Plants are the excuse we use to learn about 3D space.

I think I've given you a fair number of things to work on, so I'm going to assign a few additional pages of revision below.