To answer your question at the end there, the leaves/branches exercises certainly become part of the "pool" of exercises you pull from for your warmups. While we do not expect students to do full plant constructions as part of their warmups, they are technically exercises as well (specifically constructional drawing exercises), so there is certainly benefit in setting aside time at various points to do more of these as well. Everything you learn in this course is really just seeking to teach you how to approach practicing going forward. The how of it is up to you.

Anyway, jumping in with your arrows, you're approaching this well to start. You're focusing a great deal on executing your marks confidently, which helps to push the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. That carries over nicely into your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You're also generally building up edge detail well, although I strongly urge you to avoid any situation where you may feel tempted to draw one bit of edge detail with a single zigzagging stroke. I don't see this too much in your work, but it does occur on occasion, as we see here. Remember that this breaks this principle of markmaking from Lesson 1.

Continuing onto your branches, unfortunately here it appears you may not have gone through the instructions for this one as carefully as you should have. As noted here, the manner in which we lay out our edges - where the start and where they end - are important. Each segment starts at one ellipse, continuing past the second and stopping halfway to the third. Generally you do this part correctly. But what you tend to miss is that the next segment must start at the second ellipse, which would be half the distance between ellipses back from where the previous one ended. This results in an overlap between them, which in turn helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one segment to the next. In minimizing that overlap, we end up losing a lot of that benefit.

Carrying onto your plant constructions, by and large you've done quite well! You're constructing each and every form in its entirety, even where they overlap (which is important for understanding how those forms sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another within it), you're applying the processes for the leaf construction technique appropriately, and you're generally avoiding skipping steps. While the branch technique is not being applied correctly, that should be fairly easily remedied by simply reviewing those instructions and taking more care with applying those steps as instructed.

I have just one suggestion for you to keep in mind - when constructing your cylindrical flower pots, as you did here, be sure to:

• Construct them around a central minor axis line, as we would any cylindrical structure

• Be sure to include another ellipse inset within the opening to establish the thickness of the rim, instead of leaving it paper thin

• Include another ellipse for the level of the soil as well, so the plant's stems have something to intersect with.

Oh, I also noticed that you weren't always consistently drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed in Lesson 1.

Aside from that, you've done quite well. If you are uncertain as to what the issue is with the branches exercise, feel free to ask - but I will leave you to address that yourself on your own, and will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.