Starting with your arrows, these are looking pretty good - they're flowing confidently and fluidly through space, but there are two main issues I want to address:

• Make sure you're exaggerating the rate at which the gaps between the zigzagging sections compress as they move away from the viewer. Don't be afraid to let them overlap, as shown here.

• You appear to be applying line weight a little more liberally than you ought to. Restrict it just to specific localized areas to clarify particular overlaps between forms. You actually do this fine in certain areas, but for some reason you tend to apply more line weight towards the front of the arrow. Also, when adding line weight , be sure to do so with a confident stroke (using the ghosting method). This will ensure that you don't accidentally stiffen an existing mark, and will also allow your marks to taper more naturally on their ends to blend into the existing marks as shown here.

Moving onto your leaves, you're doing a good job of carrying that sense of fluidity and motion to capture not only how your leaves sit in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. I'm also pleased to see that in many cases you're building up edge detail by only adding little bumps individually which build off the existing structure. In this more complex leaf however, you're tending more towards replacing the existing stroke with a continuous zigzagging line. Remember that construction is not about replacing the existing structure with a new, more complex mark at every step. We build upon the previous step, only marking in the parts that change as explained here on another student's work.

Continuing onto your branches, there are a few notable issues here:

• Firstly, when practicing this exercise in the future, I strongly encourage you to draw branches that are wider, simply because it's an easier way to get comfortable with the challenges involved. Drawing smaller in any case will limit your brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, and it will also make it harder to engage your whole arm when drawing, making it more likely that you'll slip back to using your elbow or wrist. Working bigger will help you get more comfortable with all the good habits, and then it'll become easier to apply them at a smaller scale.

• It looks like you didn't follow the instructions quite correctly. As explained here, you're to make sure all your segments extend fully halfway to the next ellipse, and start each segment at the previous ellipse, providing for a healthy overlap between them. That overlap helps the segments flow more smoothly and seamlessly from one to the next, which you're definitely struggling to achieve, because of how you deviated from those directives.

Onto your plant constructions, you are overall doing pretty well, and as I scroll through the album I'm generally more and more pleased with your results. I do have a number of recommendations to keep you on the right track, however:

• When it comes to these lessons, some students purposely aim for more complex subject matter because they feel it will help them improve more quickly. I don't really find that to be the case - instead, simpler subject matter where you can really focus on executing every mark to the best of your ability, with patience and care yields far more growth overall. So I definitely think drawings like the aloe plant are vastly more valuable to learn from than this tree. Reason being, when drawing the tree - specifically the smaller, furthest extents of the branches, you ended up drawing them with less care than you could have, rushing through the process more and more. We frequently do this when we're faced with a lot of something. For example, if told to draw 100 boxes in a single drawing, we tend to draw those boxes much more sloppily than if we were told to draw 1. This of course is wrong - regardless of how complicated a drawing is, we should always be striving to make every mark as patiently as we reasonably can, applying the ghosting method and all that in every case. A drawing does not need to be completed in a single sitting, or in a single day - so we can ostensibly put in as much time as a drawing needs, not just how much we feel like giving it.

• A minor point about your aloe plant - or rather, its flower pot. When you've got a form left open along the base like that, always cap it off, in this case with an ellipse. This closes off the form and helps reinforce its solidity, whereas leaving it open causes it to appear flatter, and can impede the illusion we're trying to create. Aside from that, your work in this drawing was very well done. Those leaves all flow very nicely, and you've built up the detail along its edges well.

• In this cactus, when you got to the detail phase, you definitely got caught up in the idea of 'decorating' your drawing. 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. Remember that as discussed back in lesson 2, you should be staying away from adding form shading to your drawings. Instead, focus on communicating the kinds of things we could feel with our hands, rather than what we'd see in our photograph.

• In this drawing, I can see that you appear to have gone back over the outline of many of your leaves here. I'm assuming it's because you're adding line weight - in which case the point I raised in regards to your arrows, where line weight should be applied only to clarify specific overlaps, and should be drawn confidently, applies. Going back over your lines like this takes smooth, confident strokes, and turns them stiff and wobbly.

Aside from that, your work is indeed coming along well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but keep the points I've raised in mind as you move forwards.