Jumping right in with your arrows, these are coming along pretty well. The strokes are steady, although I wouldn't say they're quite as confident as they could be - there's a touch of hesitation in their execution that does cause some of the lines to wobble a little. Always remember that regardless of your concerns regarding accuracy, a confident stroke is always your priority. You're really close here, and even with that slight hesitation you're still capturing a good sense of flow, so just keep this in mind as you move forwards.

Continuing onto your leaves, you're handling the construction quite well - maintaining very specific, tight relationships between the different steps, and ensuring that each mark asserts something clear about the structure, and every subsequent phase abides by it. This one in particular is an excellent example of this, and I'm very pleased with how each flow line has a specific start and end point, and it all comes together without contradicting itself.

Similarly to the arrows though, I do think that you could benefit from pushing the confidence of the initial flow line stroke. Leaves are an interesting problem - in our reference images, they can easily appear as though they're quite flat and stiff, but there are subtler, more nuanced elements to them that still manage to convey a sense of organic fluidity that, when copying them line for line we tend to miss out on. It's almost that there's something there on a subtler level, that as beginners we have a harder time identifying and carrying over. It's for this reason that when you draw the flow line, it helps a lot to really exaggerate it, keeping in mind the fact that the flow line itself is not just a physical element of the leaf, but rather an abstract representation of the forces that push that leaf through the world. One thing I find helps to remind me of this is to add a little arrow head right at the tip of the flow line, to always remind myself that I'm capturing a sense of motion, of how this leaf not only sits statically in the world, but also how it moves through the space it occupies.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is coming along quite well, but there are a few things I want to bring to your attention:

• Firstly, remember - you're required to draw through each and every ellipse you freehand within this course two full times before lifting your pen, as mentioned back in Lesson 1.

• Be sure to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown here. Don't stop short, and ensure that the overlap between the segments is of about half the distance between the ellipses, so as to achieve as smooth and seamless a transition as possible.

• When drawing the ellipses themselves, remember the way in which the degree of such an elliptical cross-section shifts along the length of a cylindrical structure. This was explored in the Lesson 1 ellipes video, but the short of it is that the ellipses should get wider as they move away from the viewer along the tube.

Moving onto your plant constructions, there are a number of things I want to call out. I can see you leveraging elements of the techniques we've shared throughout this lesson to varying degrees, and you are definitely making progress in using them to build up solid, three dimensional results. There are however some areas in which you can definitely stand to see some improvement, and I think I can give you some advice to push you in that direction.

• To start, 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. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but 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.

• Currently you've got a somewhat arbitrary use of filled areas of solid black, and given the specific tools/approaches we're using throughout this course (specifically the fact that we're limited to pure black and pure white thanks to our fineliners), the way in which you're using those solid black shapes does have a tendency to throw things off at times. Given these specific limitations, the viewer will generally assume any filled area of solid black to be a cast shadow. Upon first glance, that's what their subconscious will tell them, and it will attempt to figure out the nature of the form that cast the given shadow up until it realizes that, no, those filled black shapes were not in fact cast shadows to start with. From there, it'll try to figure out what else it could possibly represent. All of this happens in a matter of milliseconds, but all the same, it's best to lean into the viewer's assumptions. If the viewer expects cast shadows, then we should reserve our filled black shapes only for cast shadows to ensure that what the viewer sees is what they expect to see, so we can communicate with them as effectively as possible. Outside of this course, when you have much more flexibility in terms of what kinds of marks we can play with, you'll find more freedom in terms of what kinds of marks can be used, and what they might represent. As you work through this course however, try to stick to using solid black for cast shadows only - meaning that whatever filled shape you add to your drawing, it should directly imply the presence of some specific form, be it a larger constructed form or a smaller, implied textural one as discussed back in Lesson 2. Avoid using it for anything else, including capturing local colour (like the splotches/growths on this mushroom), as well as form shading (which as explained here should not be included in any drawings in this course).

• When you do add cast shadow shapes - which can be quite useful when it comes to implying the presence of textural forms - it can help a lot to approach it in a two step process, first drawing the outline of your intended shadow shape, then filling it in. That is, as opposed to trying to "paint" those marks on with separate strokes, which as seen here can result in a lot more sloppiness and sketchiness. As with everything in this course, every mark we put down is something we plan out, and execute using the ghosting method. I'm noticing a fair number of instances in your work where perhaps you might feel that a specific mark is so minor it isn't worth the time investment of going through the planning and preparation phases. Every mark is worth that investment. When it comes to shadow shapes, it can help us think more about the relationship between the specific form casting the shadow, and the resulting shadow shape.

• When you have situations featuring a lot of different leaves or petals, it can be tempting to focus on capturing their general pattern or arrangement as seen in your reference image. We can see this especially on the top of these two flowers - instead of employing the technique from the leaf exercise, you created more of a criss-crossing network of lines. For the bottom one, you did follow the leaf construction steps more closely, at least for those closer to the center (using the flow line, and so on), but you didn't quite construct fully enclosed structures, and those further out to the edges were not afforded quite as much attention. I totally get that cases like this look really time consuming - and they are. That doesn't mean shortcuts should be taken. Remember that every drawing we do throughout this course serves as an exercise - a three dimensional spatial puzzle. Every time we push our brain to solve one of these puzzles, to figure out how to build up through the addition of separate, simple forms, we gradually rewire the way in which it perceives the world that exists within these pieces of paper, pushing it from perceiving them as flat lines on a flat page, to solid structures in a 3D world. Drawing each form in its entirety, even when they're overlapped and hidden by others, is key to this. It allows us to understand how each individual structure sits in space, and how it relates to those around it - but this can only be achieved by drawing each one in its entirety. At the end of the day, some subject matter is going to be more complex and more demanding than others - and that simply means that it's going to require more time to solve. Of course, just as you're not limited to half a page's worth of space for your drawings, you also are not limited to a single sitting's worth of time. Instead, you choose how much you're willing to bite off, and give yourself adequate time to chew through it - whether it's a single sitting, or multiple sittings across multiple days.

• The last thing I wanted to call out has to do with your flower pots, like those on this page. In both, you did show a willingness to add additional marks (like the extra ellipse near the top of the cylindrical one, which I believe you were using to establish the top of the soil - in which case, good job), but there is definitely more that can be achieved here. Firstly, including another ellipse inset within the opening can help to convey the thickness of that rim. This also goes for the boxy flower pot as well. As you add more ellipses (to the cylindrical one), you'll find that it is very useful to construct any cylindrical structures around a central minor axis line, to help keep them all in alignment. And one last thing about the cylindrical flower pot - as mentioned in regards to your branches exercise, the ellipses farther away should be the wider ones. You currently have this reversed, causing it to look a bit wonky.

Now, I've covered quite a few different points here, so I'm going to assign some revisions below to give you the opportunity to apply what I've shared here.