This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/kXNtIXn

Nice work! You've largely done a pretty good job, with a few things that I'd like to point out to keep you on the right track.

Starting with your arrows, they flow fairly well, but one key issue especially with the top two is that the gaps between the zigzagging sections don't compress in a manner consistent with how the arrow is moving back into space. It's fair to say that this arrow is moving somewhat erratically, but all the same, don't be afraid to let those sections overlap one another, and for that spacing to compress very quickly. It will help demonstrate the depth of the scene as a whole.

Moving onto your leaves, I think you've done a pretty great job of carrying over the sense of flow from your arrows to these concrete objects. Most students get caught up in the fact that they're drawing something real for once and it causes them to stiffen up. Instead of focusing on establishing how these leaves each sit statically in space, you've gone one step further and captured how they move through the space they occupy. Well done.

Just one tiny point - the one you labelled "fig?" has you only drawing each leaf where it would be visible (ie: not overlapped by its neighbours). Make sure you draw each one in its entirety, as though you have x-ray vision. That applies in general.

For your branches, you're largely doing a good job, and in many cases you're managing to get the segments to flow smoothly into one another. This isn't entirely consistent, but honestly I don't really expect students to be able to manage this just yet. One thing that can help reduce the visible "tails" however is to make a point of using them as a runway for your next segment. By this I mean overlapping them directly before shooting off towards your next target.

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are mostly very well done. You're pretty thorough when it comes to your use of construction, and you don't tend to stiffen up at all. As a result, your forms flow nicely, and when appropriate they appear solid. There are just a few things I'd like to mention:

• For your flower pots, don't forget that each one will have thickness, or a "lip" at its opening. You're often just drawing the mouth of the pots with a single ellipse, which makes them appear paper thin like this one. Placing another ellipse inset within that one (which admittedly is not easy) will help create the slightest impression of thickness, making it seem more like a real 3D object.

• For this one, don't let the lines just stop if the form is cut off. Actually cut it off - that is, as though you'd cut the form with a blade, cap off its bottom, in this case with another ellipse as though the pot were much shorter. This will ensure that the form feels three dimensional, whereas it would flatten out if left open like that. As a side point, nice work focusing on the cast shadows of the little bits at the base of the plant. One thing that can continue to help with this (as well as the use of cast shadows on the plant construction itself) is to try and remember where your light source is going to be, and keeping your shadows consistent with that (always having the shadows fall on one side, for example).

• For the leaves on this page, you ended up breaking away from adhering closely to the earlier phases of construction, and instead treated them too loosely. This sort of zigzagging around the basic structure is an issue I address in these notes. Similar problem here, where you're basically skipping steps, trying to put information down that the existing structure on the page cannot yet support.

• The little flower-bulbs in this drawing really do seem like the stars of the drawing, but they end up being given fairly little space, causing them to come out rather cramped. As a result, you didn't have much room for your brain to think through their spatial problems. In this case, I'd recommend zeroing in on just a few of them (or even just one) and allowing them/it to take up more of the overall page.

All in all, definitely a lot of good work, with a handful of things to keep an eye on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/sBi5rpx

Nice work! Starting with your arrows, these are largely looking very well done, and convey a strong sense of fluidity and energy in how they flow through all three dimensions of space. I did notice a couple places where you seemed to redraw lines where you may have felt you'd made a mistake, which resulted in those areas getting scratchy, though for the most part you did a good job of drawing with confidence and avoiding any such habits.

Moving onto your leaves, I'm very pleased with how you largely carried over the same confidence and flow from your arrows, and also demonstrated a strong grasp of how construction is to be applied, adhering to the underlying phases when adding new detail. I did notice a couple places where you strayed from this however - specifically on these two spiky leaves, we can see where the spikes zigzag around the previous phase of construction (the simpler edge). In these cases, as shown here, it's best to either add those to the simpler form of the leaf by ensuring every spike comes off the simpler edge.

Moving onto your branches, you largely did a good job, but I did notice one common but important mistake - you only seem to extend your edges slightly past a given ellipse, rather than the full halfway towards the next ellipse. This additional extension is important because it gives us ample runway for our next segment to overlap directly before firing off towards its next goal. This in turn allows us to make the segments flow together more seamlessly, instead of having visible breaks between them.

Moving onto your plant constructions, these are largely very well done. You're demonstrating a really confident manipulation of form, both the more solid forms we see in our flower pots, and the fluid, flowing forms of the leaves and petals. I do feel that you're certainly drawing with a great deal of confidence behind your marks, which generally is a strength, though there are certainly places where this may drive you to take action a little too soon. For example, the flower pot on this page ends up being slightly haphazard. Taking the time to construct your cylindrical forms around a central minor axis line, and then ghosting through each ellipse a little more will certainly improve your results. Don't lose that confidence, just be sure to reinforce it with proper planning beforehand.

Another thing I noticed was that you usually give your drawings plenty of room for your brain to think through their spatial problems, but there were a couple exceptions. For example, the orchids are quite tall, and therefore the flowers themselves end up being cramped into a fairly small space. To top this off, it was placed in a page with another drawing, giving it only half as much space as it otherwise could have had. On top of giving such plants their own dedicated page, you may also consider just drawing the orchid flowers themselves, allowing you to focus more specifically on their forms and how they flow through space and relate to one another.

The last point I wanted to make is about this more detailed drawing. I think this was a pretty solid attempt at adding more detail and texture to your drawings, and you should be pleased with the result. I did however notice that there was a tendency to be a little more scratchy with your linework, using more hatching in certain places (likely to represent the gills of the mushrooms, which is certainly a good way of thinking). The result however is that you end up with a lot of little pockets of sharp contrast, with a lot of white/black crammed together. This kind of contrast will draw the eye due to its visual noise - and when it comes to composition, controlling where the eye goes is key. So, it's generally good to allow yourself to let these areas fuse into larger, more solid shadow shapes, filling them with black and allowing the edges of these shapes to tell us about those shapes' contents, rather than having lots of little bits of white inside. This will allow you to focus the viewer's eye where you want it to go, instead of having it get lost in the weeds, so to speak.

To that point, just one last thing - I noticed that the dirt/gravel at the base of this lovely little cactus were largely drawn with fairly complete outlines around then, then hit with little splashes of shadow. When tackling this kind of texture in the future, leave the lines out entirely. Try your best to capture the impression of the little nuggets of dirt using shadow shapes alone. I know it's difficult to do this without being able to first establish where each piece of dirt sits, but try and focus in on one individual piece at a time, placing the shadow it would reasonably cast, then moving onto its neighbours.

So! All in all, great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/HCUd3Tu

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.

I'd like to see the following:

1 page of leaves

2 pages of branches

4 pages of plant constructions

Make sure your scanner is set to a preset or profile that doesn't increase the contrast (to better capture the nuance of your linework), be sure to draw through all of your ellipses and to draw each form in its entirety to establish how they sit in 3D space. Also, don't give flower pots less attention.

Source: https://imgur.com/a/MQLFM6T

This is definitely a big move in the right direction! Your images capture a much greater range of nuance in your drawings (looks like you ended up just using a camera instead, which is totally fine). You're also doing much better with your leaf and branches exercises, and perhaps most importantly, the improvement to your actual plant constructions is significant. You've clearly invested far more time and care into each construction, and they've come out far better for it.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/3giNBYj

Starting with arrows, nice work getting them to flow confidently and fluidly through space, though in some cases I'm noticing that you're applying perspective to the positive space (the width of the ribbons) but not to the negative space (the space between the zigzagging sections). Letting that spacing compress as it gets farther away is important, as is allowing those sections to overlap where appropriate. Both are effective ways to further demonstrate the depth in the scene.

Moving onto your leaves, these are generally pretty well done, especially in terms of your use of the constructional techniques covered in the lesson. You're mindful of how the additional edge detail builds directly on top of the simpler structure laid out in the previous phase. One thing I am noticing however is that your leaves here are definitely much more rigid and stiff than your arrows in the previous page were. While they have some flexibility to them, the arrows gave the impression of how they actually moved through the space they occupied, whereas the leaves feel somewhat more like they're sitting frozen in space. One thing that can help with this is to add a little arrow head at the tip of your initial flow line, as this can help to remind you that you're capturing just how this form moves through space, not just capturing lines on a flat page.

Your branches are off to a good start, but there's definitely a good deal of rigidity here. Remember that the key focus to this exercise is to achieve the impression that the segments flow fluidly together, as though they're just a single continuous edge. On the first half of your page, there's definitely a visible hitch at each ellipse, making the sections seem more staggered rather than continuous. The second half is definitely improved, and moving in the right direction, but there's still room for improvement. Make sure you're extending those segments a full halfway to the next ellipse (there are many cases where you're letting them stop way too soon), and use the last bit of the previous segment as a runway for your next one, overlapping it directly before shooting off towards your next target.

Overall I think your plant constructions are coming along quite nicely overall. There are a few issues I'll point out, but the overall trend is that you're showing a good grasp of the material. Here are my observations:

• You've got a lot of excellent fluidity on the leaves in this page, but watch out for those open-ended leaves you've drawn. Cap off every form, even if it's getting cut off. Leaving things open will undermine the impression that the construction as a whole is three dimensional.

• On this page, I feel you got somewhat overwhelmed by all of the things there are to pay attention to, and in doing so you ended up getting a little erratic and haphazard with a lot of the marks you were putting down. Complicated problems are all the more reason to take a step back, take a breath, and try and break the whole thing down into smaller problems that can be dealt with one after the other. Just because a drawing involves putting down a lot of lines does not mean that the individual marks should be receiving less attention and patience. We still ought ot be using the ghosting method for every single mark we draw.

• A key mistake with these mushrooms is how their bases actually connect to the branch off which they're growing. Remember how the degree of an ellipse conveys the orientation of the circle it represents in space. If we're looking straight on at the circle, then the ellipse will have a very wide degree. If we're looking at it side-long, it'll be a much narrower degree. Given that the base of one of the mushrooms was towards the middle of the branch-cylinder, this would have been facing us somewhat more head-on, so the ellipse defining the connection between the forms ought to have been much wider.

• Also worth mentioning for that drawing, you definitely got caught up in drawing the full outlines of each little textural form along the mushroom's surface. Remember that when drawing texture, we don't use outlines at all - we focus only on cast shadows. I can see you tried to do more of this along the branch, but it doesn't seem like you took it very far.

• I felt this hibiscus was very well done. The structured approach to the petals and the confident, measured way you got even into some of the detail (with the cast shadows and such) came out quite nicely.

All in all you do have things to work on, but are definitely moving in the right direction and are showing a good understanding of core concepts. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/kXNtIXn

You definitely start off this batch a lot weaker than you finish, in that with some of the early leaf drawings you're not at all following the instructions. This does show that you're improving, and that you are learning, but that you might have a predisposition to barreling ahead rather than thinking about what exactly is being asked of you ahead of time.

Starting with your arrows, just a minor point - keep exaggerating how the spacing between the zigzagging sections compress in space as we look farther back. While the amount of zigzagging here doesn't necessarily allow me to judge whether or not you understand how perspective applies to it, there are signs that you're generally hesitant to let that space get tighter, or ever allow those zigzagging sections to overlap one another. In the upper right there, it actually widens as it gets farther away, which is not in line with reality. When drawing these, focus on how perspective applies to both positive and negative space.

The leaf on the top of this page, as well as the maple leaf there, categorically go against the exercise. The leaf on the far left-middle of the page is closer in that you're actually following the steps of construction, though your additional edge detail there treats the simpler shape of the leaf laid down in the previous stage as a loose suggestion, instead of as solid scaffolding. Observe carefully how in this demonstration the one with the checkmark touches that earlier shape directly, coming off of it and then returning to it. It respects this as a structure onto which it is being built, not a sketch on a page meant to be ignored or adjusted as needed.

Your branches exercise is moving in the right direction, although I can see that you're definitely rushing through it. The marks don't show a whole lot of preparation preceding the actual execution of the mark, but even moreso the hatching you've placed along the ends is visibly sloppy. This is present in a lot of your constructional drawings, where you're putting the lines down quickly and somewhat thoughtlessly, and treating it more like a loose sketch.

This drawing however, is visibly better. Are there issues? Yes - for example, you're not drawing through each form in its entirety, instead allowing the lines to stop where a given form is overlapped by another (drawing through forms is important to better understand how they exist in relation to one another). You're also still drawing lines reflexively - I can see several places where you've drawn an additional mark automatically, instead of purposefully executing just a single mark. And there certainly is rushing, but when we compare it to what you did for this same plant in your last attempt, you're demonstrating a LOT more patience and care.

At the end of the day though, while you're showing some moves forward, you're still looking at drawing as though it's just sketching. Like you should be able to produce good work by instinct and intuition, rather than through explicit planning and thought. If you compare what I do in the daisy demo to what you're doing, the processes - not just the quality of the resulting lines - are fundamentally different. It's assumed that you'll have difficulty drawing your lines with as much precision, but it seems to me that because you don't feel confident in your ability to draw in this manner, you try and change the process itself to something you may be more comfortable with. You're replacing the problem, instead of allowing yourself to do it badly.

Instead of having you redo the entire lesson again, I'm going to ask for the following:

4 pages of leaves. I don't want to see sketchy, haphazard construction. Look at the specificity with which I approach every single mark I put down even in more complex, potentially overwhelming ones. I don't get lost in the totality of what I'm drawing. A line is just a line, and so I treat it as such.

4 pages of plant drawings. Take your time. It doesn't look like these drawings took you more than 10 minutes each.

2nd source: https://imgur.com/a/ML20Qhj

Here are some notes about your leaves. On there, I also pointed out that you're zigzagging your lines around the underlying structure when adding wavier edges, which is something I specifically address here.

A key problem with your leaves is that you're leaving a lot of gaps, not actually allowing them to be fully enclosed forms, and instead reminding the viewer that they are merely a collection of lines. Notice the difference between how I draw in my little demonstrations on top of your page - my leaves are fully closed, and my lines are drawn to be specific. Yours still appear more to be somewhat instinctual, as though you are sketching and trying to rely on your gut. Don't forget about the use of the ghosting method for every single mark you put down - if we look at leaves like those on this page, it'd be hard to argue that the ghosting method was used for any of the outlines of the leaves.

For this drawing, when drawing the fern, you zigzag your lines back and forth throughout in many cases, which breaks this principle of markmaking. You need to be drawing each segment individually, so you can actually design how they move through space. By zigzagging, you end up focusing again on how the lines exist in the two dimensions of the page, not how they move through 3D space.

Overall, the problems are at their core the same as before. You're not following the instructions as they're written, and you're allowing yourself to be loose and approximate, instead of building directly upon the marks you put down. This comparison of two leaves in one of your plant drawings captures the issue fairly succinctly. There's no reason that the leaf circled on the left was approached differently than the leaf circled on the right.

Now it is entirely normal to get nervous when putting a mark down, especially in ink - but that is part of the exercise, to still your mind and step back when you feel frazzled. I think instead of having you immediately do more plant drawings, we're going to take a bit of a step back to some earlier exercises.

I'd like to see the following:

4 pages of ellipses in planes. Do not rush these. Invest as much time as you need into every single mark you put down. Apply the ghosting method, draw from your shoulder, and so on.

2 pages of organic arrows.

2 pages of freely rotated boxes (like the box challenge, including line extensions)

Since you ought to have been doing plenty of these past exercises in your warmups (as explained back in lesson 0), this should not be anything new. Regardless, make sure you read the instructions for each of these exercises before doing the assigned pages so they're fresh in your memory.

Once you've done that, do the following:

1 page of leaves

Just 1 plant drawing. Show me that you can apply the concepts covered in the earlier lessons, that you can build directly on top of your various phases of construction and respect the fact that everything you draw is being created in three dimensions, not just as lines on a page. And pick something simple. There's no need to draw something complex and challenging.

3rd source: https://imgur.com/a/rLdTXh4

Alright, I think you're getting there. I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but there are definitely still things to continue working on:

• You've still got some gaps between phases of construction, as shown here. Continue working to keep everything tightly bound.

• As shown here, always construct a simpler structure first, then build up complexity. Even if the form you're after is just a little complex, always construct it in this step by step manner.

You're demonstrating more control now, but there's still a ways to go - constructional drawing as used in drawabox is all about the relationships between our phases of construction building directly on top of one another, and you're still working towards that. Gaps and holes remind the viewer that they're looking at a 2D drawing, so they need to be avoided, instead giving the impression that everything is solid and three dimensional.

This is not an actual critique for this work and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/0o7lPL7

Starting with your arrows, you've got them flowing quite nicely and confidently through space. One thing to keep an eye on however is to always make sure that the gaps between your zigzagging sections get smaller as they move back in space, and to have them do so in a consistent manner.

An amount of the confident fluidity of your arrows definitely carries over into your leaves, though I do think that at the same time you are stiffening up a little in the face of actually drawing more concrete objects instead of something more abstract. When drawing the flow lines of your leaves, it's important to think not only of how it's going to sit statically in 3D space, but how it is actually moving through that space. This flow line represents the forces that drive the leaf - wind, air currents, etc. - and pushing through this line with a sense of energy will help imbue your leaf with life. One thing that can help with this is to add a little arrowhead at the tip of your flow line.

Other than that, you've done an excellent job of adhering to the underlying structure of your leaf construction when adding additional detail. You're showing considerable respect here for the bounds set out by previous phases of construction, and are respecting the answers you've given to certain questions/problems without seeking to provide new contradictory answers later on in the process.

Finally, moving onto your branches, you're doing an excellent job here. You're mindful of extending the segments fully halfway towards the next ellipse, and you're doing a great job of keeping the widths of your branches consistent throughout their length with no sudden pinching or swelling. There are a couple visible 'tails' where the segments don't quite flow into one another - one thing that helps with this is to make a point of using a the last bit of the previous segment as a runway for the next segment to overlap directly before shooting off towards its next target. This may hurt the results of that branch itself, but by forcing yourself to roll with the consequences of every mark, it'll encourage you to improve them more quickly.

Honestly, looking at your actual plant constructions, I'm afraid I don't have too much else to offer. Your work here is fantastic, and you're taking the points I made about your respect for the constructional process in regards to your leaves to an even further level. The result are constructions that feel solid and tangible, that carry an impression of weight and solidity. You're also demonstrating a measured, light touch when it comes to implying certain aspects of detail - for example, the long lines that run along the length of flower petals - the way you've drawn them does not create visual noise, but instead they flow smoothly and fluidly, ever in line with the surface without contradicting it at any point.

You build up your constructions with a great deal of patience, never overextending yourself to add an complexity that cannot be supported by the existing structure. You're also leveraging line weight and cast shadows effectively to help organize your drawings and bring emphasis where you need it to be, while letting the less important elements drift to the back.

You've done a fantastic job, and should be proud of yourself. I will happily mark this lesson as complete, and I am excited to see how your work for the next few lessons will turn out.

Edit: I just went back and read your comments (I usually ignore them unless they contain questions, as I prefer them not to taint my own point of view), and I suppose the main thing you need to work on is your tendency for self-criticism. While it is absolutely valuable to see your flaws and mistakes, it's also critically important to leave room for acknowledging your strengths and successes.

A lot of students tend to fall into this trap of feeling nothing but dissatisfaction with their own work, and to a point, that is one of the things that make external critique valuable. Reason being, what you look for in your drawing may be entirely different from what is expected of you within the limits of a given lesson. You may be delivering exactly what I'm asking for and demonstrating a keen grasp of the material in the lesson, while not ticking your own boxes.

When I say your work here is very well done, I mean it. I'm not above breaking down students' mistakes when they clearly disregard the principles covered in my lessons. I am also not against giving credit where it is due. You've done a great job, but it may take a little more experience to open your eyes to exactly why that is.