Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of drawing with a great deal of confidence, which helps establish how each individual ribbon flows fluidly through space. There are a few places with a bit of hesitation though, so be sure to keep an eye on that - especially when you draw the arrow heads themselves. Also, try not to get too heavy with your line weight, and be sure to use the ghosting method when applying it. I'm glad to see that you're executing these additional marks with confidence as well (even though it may hinder your accuracy) - but being sure to invest time in the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method will help counteract the loss of accuracy somewhat.

Continuing onto your leaves, while you're moving in the right direction, I am noticing that your linework here is visibly more hesitant than in your arrows, suggesting that you're probably getting more caught up in the fact that you're trying to capture something tangible and real (an actual leaf). This is normal, but it is also something that the constructional approach, when used appropriately, is designed to help with.

Construction is all about taking a complex problem (drawing a real leaf) and breaking it down into a series of smaller, simpler problems that can be dealt with one at a time. So the first step as introduced in the exercise is to establish the flow line. This line's entire job is to capture, just like the arrows from the previous exercise, how our leaf actually flows through space. It has to be drawn with a particular focus on confidence and fluidity rather than accuracy - it doesn't matter if you deviate a little here and there from your reference image. What matters is that you're capturing a sense of motion. Use the ghosting method, and avoid hesitation at all costs.

One thing that I find can help connect our brains with the kind of confidence and fluidity we use in the arrows exercise is to place a tiny arrowhead at the end of our flow line. You can actually see this in the demonstration from the exercise instructions.

When it comes to building up complexity in successive constructional phases, you're mostly moving in the right direction. I can see that you are, for the most part, building up that edge detail with small additions that rise off the existing edge and return to it, making adjustments rather than attempting to replace the whole previous phase of construction. That said, there are some small areas in which you do end up zigzagging back and forth across the previous edge, which results in a weaker relationship between constructional phases.

Here it's pretty obvious that you're drawing a single continuous edge back and forth, and that's an approach you want to avoid, as it breaks the third principle of markmaking from lesson 1. Draw each separate bump one at a time, with separate strokes. Also, avoid drawing the later phases of construction darker than those before it. As we can see with your apple leaf, it ends up encouraging you to replace more of the previous phase of construction than you need to. Keep the thickness roughly the same, and only add the parts that change.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is largely well done. There are a few cases where you aren't quite extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, but for the most part you are, and you're making progress in achieving smoother, more seamless transitions. This will continue to improve with practice.

Looking at your plant constructions, for the most part you've done a good job - there are just a few issues I want to call out. As it stands, you're applying most of the principles of constructions quite well - aside from a few places where the relationships between phases of construction become looser, which I'll talk about. Your markmaking also remains confident, and I believe the fluidity of your leaves and petals improves compared to the leaves exercise.

Here are the main issues I want to call out:

• In your daisy demo, you started out with an ellipse (as a side note, remember to draw through all of your ellipses throughout this course two full times before lifting your pen), but ultimately ended up ignoring it through the rest of the steps. Every mark you put down in a construction serves a purpose - here, that ellipse would have been used to define the extent to which your daisy's petals would extend. Once put down on the page, you must abide by the decision, and you do not have the option to ignore it, even if doing so would help you achieve a drawing that is closer to your reference. The goal here is not to replicate the reference perfectly, but rather to use it as a source of information to help you build up a new object on the page. So, in this case you would ensure that your flow lines all end at the perimeter of the ellipse, and then you would ensure that your petals end at the ends of your flow lines (instead of leaving an arbitrary distance between the end of the flow line and the end of the petal itself, as you did). The same issue is present in your hibiscus drawing.

• With this magnolia you get a bit too heavy with your line weight. Line weight itself is a tool with specific requirements, and a specific purpose. It's important that you keep your line weight light and subtle - like a whisper to the viewer's subconscious, rather than an obvious shout. Its purpose is primarily to help clarify how specific forms overlap one another in specific, localized areas - rather than reinforcing the entire silhouette of an existing form. We want to avoid anything that's going to cause us to trace hesitantly along a longer chunk of line - instead focusing on shorter segments where we can still execute those marks confidently, using the ghosting method. Also, remember that as discussed back in lesson 2, form shading (which it appears you were trying to add to the stem) should not be included in the drawings you do for this course.

• Throughout the homework, you definitely experiment with different levels of detail, going from a fairly light touch to some pretty heavy rendering with the monstera. Now, I did just draw your attention to the whole no-form-shading thing, which plays a big role here, but it's more useful to talk about what one's goals are when they get into the detail phase. Here, it appears that your goal falls more to "decoration" - which is why it's not particularly consistent. It's very hard to decide how much decoration is "enough". 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 instead of worrying about something as arbitrary as decoration and having a nice, impressive drawing at the end - focus on the information you're trying to convey to the viewer about the object you're drawing. If you can convey something with less work, less ink, and fewer marks on the page, then that is probably a more efficient approach. Less is more.

• With your potato plant you ended up leaving out the cast shadows of most of these leaves, focusing instead on just filling the negative space between them. Our filled areas of solid black, throughout all of our drawings in this course, will always represent cast shadows (for the sake of consistency and clear communication with the viewer). Leaving the other cast shadows out, however, makes it unclear what the filled areas of solid black between the leaves is supposed to represent. With the cast shadows, however, it becomes clearer that the negative space areas are just more cast shadows, where the foliage is so dense that the ground beneath is completely covered. Be sure to follow all steps of a given demo, rather than stopping at an arbitrary point.

So! You've got some things to work on, but all in all you're moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.