Starting with your arrows, they're looking good. They flow quite nicely through all three dimensions of space, and you're generally applying the compression of space that comes with perspective to the distances between the zigzagging sections, although I did notice that as they get farther away, you start to end up with a more consistent spacing, often avoiding letting them overlap (though you've got some nice overlapping in a few places). Just something to keep in mind.

Moving onto your leaves, they do get a little more stiff here, compared to the arrows. This can often happen when students get more focused on the fact that they're drawing a concrete object now instead of just abstract things. This causes us to put all our effort towards capturing how the forms sit statically within space, but our leaves are more than just big heavy solid objects. They have flow to them, they are pushed and pulled through space by the wind, and so capturing how they move through the space they occupy. One thing that can help with this is to simply draw a little arrowhead at the end of the initial flow line. This can help us to think about how that line represents the forces that apply to the leaf, that drive it through the world, giving ourselves a basis of motion upon which to build our leaves.

Additionally, I've started noticing that your linework has a rather uniform quality to it. Each stroke seems entirely the same weight throughout its entire length, rather than showing signs of a more normal, confident stroke. Generally when a mark is drawn confidently, the pen will be moving before it is able to fully make contact with the page, resulting in ends that taper. In your work, however, the linework appears more as though the pen was fully touching the page before setting off.

There are 3 possible causes for this, but it is likely a mixture of all three:

• Your scanner settings. It's very clear that your scanner is doing more than just capturing the image - you're likely using the "drawing" presets, which ramps up the contrast and really blasts out any middle ground, eliminating the nuance of your linework and leaving us with more on the ends of heavy blacks or full whites. Instead, you should be using the photo presets, which capture the image more faithfully.

• Drawing too slowly. If you draw a little slower, your pen will have a chance to make full contact with the page before moving onward, giving a more uniform appearance to your line, rather than a natural taper.

• Pressing too hard. If you press harder, it'll basically touch down on the page much quicker, resulting in the same effect as drawing slower.

Moving onto your branches, you're heading in the right direction, but ther is plenty of room for improvement. First and foremost, I'm noticing that you're not fully drawing through your ellipses. You should be drawing through them two full times, right now you're stuck at 1 or 1 and a half at most. Secondly, your actual lines are struggling in terms of accuracy. This is admittedly pretty normal. Seeing those 'tails' is fairly standard for this exercise, but I think you are showing signs of perhaps not investing as much time in the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method, resulting in them being further off the mark than they generally would be. You may also not be rotating your page as needed to find a comfortable angle of approach.

When doing this exercise in the future, make a point of using the previous segment as a runway for the next one - that means overlapping it directly before shooting off towards your next target. This will force you to contend with the inaccuracies of those segments, rather than being able to draw your next one where the previous one ought to have been.

Moving onto your plant constructions, your results are somewhat varied. A number of the issues I talked about earlier are still certainly still present, but there are a number of others that I want to draw your attention to:

• Here you're not drawing through the forms of your flower pot. That means drawing those forms in their entirety, as though you have x-ray vision, including the ellipses for the bottom of the pot, as well as along the rim. You're also not drawing the full thickness of the flower pot's lip, which would generally be done with an ellipse inset within the one you did draw. Drawing through your forms helps us to better understand how they sit in space. It's worth mentioning that you also didn't draw through those ellipses (going back around them two full times), resulting in extremely uneven shapes. Keep in mind that drawing through your forms (like we did with the boxes in the box challenge, drawing all the lines that make up the form) is different from drawing through your ellipses... it's an unfortunate overlap in terminology that may confuse you if you think they're the same thing.

• As a side note about flower pots, if they're cylindrical, construct them around a central minor axis line. This will help you align all of the ellipses you'll need to draw.

• The cactus itself has its individual arms drawn as pretty complex forms from the get go. Constructional drawing is all about building up complexity gradually, starting with absolutely simple forms. This is because simple forms are much easier to imbue with the illusion of solidity. If you jump too complex too quickly, your drawings will appear as being entirely flat.

• You're doing a better job of drawing through your forms here.

• The flower pot in this drawing is also extremely simplistic. Even though the lesson is focused on plants, whatever you draw should be treated with the same attention. Also, don't just leave the bottom of the form open as you've done there, as this flattens things out. You need to cap it off with another ellipse to ensure that it maintains the illusion of being three dimensional.

• For the flower in the top left of this page, you started out with an ellipse to establish the bounds of where the petals of the flower would extend. You then went on to largely ignore this ellipse, letting those petals extend to wherever, causing a contradiction in your drawing. Every single mark you draw on the page exists as a declaration of something about the object you're drawing. You're effectively answering a question, so you can think of your drawing as your response to an interrogation. If you answer the question one way, and then go on to answer it differently when asked again, you give away the fact that you're lying - that what the viewer is looking at is not an actual flower, but rather just a series of lines on a flat page. Avoid contradictions wherever possible, and adhere to every decision and answer you've given already, even if this leads you to draw something that is somewhat different from your reference image.

• Lastly, I noticed that the line weights in this drawing got somewhat out of control, with a lot of areas becoming extremely thick, and for no apparent reason. This sometimes happens when students try and cover up mistakes where they may have accidentally drawn a line, realized it was wrong, then tried to correct it. If you make a mistake, leave it be - you don't want your mistakes to determine which lines are thicker (and in turn, which areas of the drawing draw your viewer's attention). If however this was intentional, line weight is meant to be subtle - the thicker you get, the more you're going to flatten out your drawing, turning it into a graphic element. Line weight works on relative terms - the subconscious picks up the fact that one line is slightly thicker than another, and so while your conscious brain may not realize, the information is still whispered into your ear. If you need to get thicker than that, then you get into the territory of establishing cast shadows, which behave differently from line weight. Specifically, they don't stick to the form that casts them like lineweight does - they fall on other surfaces.

So, while you've got some good development here, there are definitely things I want you to continue to work on before marking this lesson as complete to show that you understand what I've laid out in this critique. I'll list them below.