Starting with your leaves, these are coming along okay, but the main thing I want you to keep an eye on is the fact that you're drawing your later marks purposely darker than those that precede them. I'm guessing that you're pressing harder, or possibly drawing more slowly. Try to keep the thickness of your lines roughly consistent as you move through the phases of construction.

For your branches, you've got varying degrees of success. There are definitely areas where your linework is sloppier, and others where it's less so. This begs certain questions - how exactly is your approach differing from mark to mark? Are you rotating your page? I can see that you're putting down marks to plan out your strokes, which is definitely good and shows that you're definitely putting effort in here, but there is something that is holding your markmaking back.

If at all possible, it would help a lot to see a recording of how you actually draw your lines - that is, a recording with a phone camera or something to watch your process, and how your arm moves as you do it. It would help to identify any potential issues that go beyond just needing more practice/mileage.

Now, I did also notice some places where the planning of your marks was also kind of sloppy - like here where your strokes didn't overlap much. This suggests to me that you may have rushed here more than you did in other areas.

Continuing onto your morel mushroom, I'm actually unsure here as to whether you were following along with the demonstration that was available at the bottom of the mushroom demo (I had done an informal one for the morel mushroom here), but I'm assuming you were doing it on your own. If you were following along with it, then I think the key issue there would just be to invest more time in observing. The individual choices we make - every mark, every ellipse, etc. is important. If you weren't following along with the demo, then... well, take a look at the demo.

Edit: Shoot - it looks like I thanks to a bug, the rest of the critique I wrote didn't take, so I'll have to write it again.

So the other issue is that the areas you're filling with solid black are largely guesswork. As discussed back in Lesson 2, the focus is very much on cast shadows as being a tool for implying the presence of forms. That goes for all cast shadow shapes you draw.

It's not enough to just draw them arbitrarily, or from observation - when we observe our references, we may see cast shadows, but that's just the first step. It is from those cast shadow shapes that the reference tells us about what forms are present in the construction.

We draw our cast shadow shapes by leveraging what we understand about the forms themselves. It's not something we're really doing from observation, except that observation tells us what those individual forms are like. Based on our understanding of them, we then create new cast shadows.

In our drawings here, there are no filled black shapes that aren't cast shadows - but that also means that every shadow defines the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface upon which they're cast. If you don't know the specific nature of the form casting the shadow, then there's no way that shadow is actually going to come out correctly.

If you look at the shadows along the stock of the mushroom, those don't actually imply any clear forms - they're just arbitrary, probably drawn directly from observation but without actually thinking about the nature of the forms that cast it.

Also, resist the temptation of just filling in shapes that already exist - like the holes in your morel mushroom. Again - every cast shadow needs to specifically have a shape that'll relate to those forms. There's actually one example, in the potato plant demo, where we fill in some of the negative space between the leaves in a certain area - the only reason we were able to do that is because the foliage was so thick that all the dirt underneath was going to be covered in shadow. The other shadows cast by the other leaves (where we get actual, distinct shadows) however are necessary for that to make sense, because they help us understand where the light is coming from.

Just to drive the point home, I noticed that in your sunflower, you specifically filled the shapes that occurred where your petals overlapped. I'm not really sure what you were going for with that choice, but it does make it clear that you weren't really sure how to use those areas of filled black. All these shapes will always be cast shadows, and nothing else. In this course we don't capture any form shading (as discussed here), we don't capture any local colour (like where parts of the object have a black or darker coloured surface). When the viewer looks at the drawing, because of the limitations of our tools, working strictly with black and white, they will try to interpret such shapes as being cast shadows, and will only move on from that when it is clear that they don't make sense as such. At that point, however, you've already lost the battle.

Now, I'm getting pretty scattered in this critique, primarily because the nature of the issues here pertain more to underlying issues with your understanding of the material. I can pick at individual issues with the drawings, but that won't really get us far. So I am glad that you understand that a full redo of the lesson is definitely in your best interest, as that is the path we will be taking. When you're done, you'll need to submit it as a fresh submission, which will cost you two credits.

I do have a few recommendations however:

• When you do the lesson over, don't worry about detail or texture at all. I rambled a lot about cast shadows, but the understanding of how they work is actually more based on your understanding of how these forms exist in 3D space, and that is actually what the construction tackles best. So let's focus more on construction for now, and avoid distracting ourselves with additional challenges.

• I strongly recommend that you reread the lesson notes and video material for Lesson 1's lines and ellipses sections. I redid them a few months ago to make them clearer and more concise. Be sure to go over the ghosted lines notes too, to refresh yourself on the principles behind the ghosting method.

• Be sure to keep up with those earlier exercises as part of a regular warmup routine, as discussed here.

If you are able to make a recording of you just drawing individual lines, using the ghosting method, etc. then you can feel free to post it as a reply to this critique. Identifying any issues with that approach now will definitely help.