Jumping right in with your arrows, these are off to a great start, specifically in the fact that you've drawn them with a great deal of confidence, which has really helped to establish the fluidity with which they move through the world. We assign this exercise here because it generally leads really nicely into the leaves exercise, where achieving a good sense of fluidity to that initial flow line can really help to capture the way in which a leaf not only sit statically in space, but also how it moves through the world.

Now, while I can see that sense of movement in some of your leaves (for example the two left-most on the page), as you push towards the right, it feels like you're less cognizant of how that flow line establishes the way in which the given leaf moves through the world. This is common - it's the first time we're drawing concrete objects, using reference in this course, and so students often do hyper-focus on the idea of simply capturing what's there.

That's why construction as an approach can be so useful - it breaks complex problems into a series of smaller, individual problems. If, when drawing the flow line, we focus only on the idea that this line establishes a path of motion through the world, and represents the actual forces of wind and air currents which push the leaf around, it can help us to exaggerate and emphasize that aspect of the leaf. From there, everything else simply follows that which the flow line has established - the simple leaf silhouette we build on top of it echoes the same fluidity, and then the edge detail we build up runs along the given silhouette.

To that point, I did notice that you didn't really tackle much in the way of more complex edge detail. You do have a few attempts at complex leaf structures, which I'm glad to see, but only one example of some spikier edges being added to one of your leaves. There are a number of other simple leaf structures there that you could have added more edge detail to, but it seems you chose not to. Remember - of the 4 leaf construction exercise steps, only the 4th is optional. Edge detail, being the 3rd step, is necessary.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is largely well done, but there are two main things you need to keep in mind:

• Firstly, remember that as explained here, you need each segment to extend fully halfway to the next ellipse. Right now the way in which you're drawing your segments (where they start and where they end) appears to be somewhat arbitrary, but this exercise imposes specific requirements. Your first segment extends from your first ellipse, past the second, and stops halfway to the third. Then your next segment starts at the second ellipse and repeats this pattern, so as to achieve a healthy overlap between them. That overlap is important, as it helps us achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one segment to the next.

• When drawing the ellipses themselves, keep in mind how the degree of each ellipse impacts what we know of the orientation in 3D space of the circular cross-section it represents. We go over this in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, so you can refer back to that if you're not sure what I mean here.

Finally, moving onto your plant constructions, overall you're doing a pretty good job but there are a few things I want to call out. Before I get to that however, I will say that your approach (in terms of combining different reference images as needed, and making adjustments where you feel they're required) is correct. The reference we employ is a source of information - we're not striving to go out of our way to reproduce a specific picture with hyper accuracy, and inevitably we will end up diverging from the given reference due proportional mistakes or whatever else, and that's fine. That said, we still want to strive to observe our reference material as closely as we can in order to determine which next form to add at every step, rather than relying on guesswork, but based on your work, you do understand that.

So, here are the main points I wanted to draw your attention to:

• Always keep the relationships between your different phases of construction tight and specific, and ensure that you're completely aware of the specific purpose/role a given mark plays as part of the larger construction. For example, on this one you started out with an ellipse. Now, it's possible that this is meant to represent the soil within a flower pot, and that the ellipse marks the edges of the pot's rim, but based on the information we have here I suspect that this is more similar to how we use an ellipse towards the beginning of the hibiscus demo. If that is the case, then that ellipse's purpose is to define the extent to which each petal (or each petal of a given group) will reach, and so when we draw the flow line for any petal/leaf in that group, it needs to extend all the way to the ellipse's perimeter, resulting in a tight, specific relationship between the previous phase of construction (the leaf) and the next one (the flow lines). Every step of construction makes a decision, so be sure to hold to those decisions as you push forwards. This plant runs into a similar issue, though here the specific use of the ellipse as defining the boundary for the petals is more clear.

• This isn't something I expect you to be aware of right now, but it's more of something to keep in mind as you move forwards. In these mushrooms, you opted to fill a specific section of each mushroom in with solid black. In our drawings, we have a lot of tools that we can employ (one of them being our filled black shapes), but given the specific restrictions and limitations we're working with (for example, the fact that we're working in stark black and white), there are some ways in which those tools can be used that are more effective than others. For example, filled black shapes are best left reserved only for cast shadows - meaning that they end up defining the relationship between the form that casts it, and the surface that receives it. This can occur with larger constructed forms, as well as with smaller textural forms, which as discussed back in Lesson 2 employ implicit markmaking (that is, drawing the shadow a form casts, rather than outlining the form itself). If, however, we opt to limit our filled black shapes to this specific purpose only (which is beneficial because it ensures that this same tool is always signifying the same thing, or being used for the same consistent purpose, making it easier for the viewer to understand), then it means we can't use it for anything else. In this mushroom drawing, you may have been using it to capture the local surface colour of part of the mushroom (perhaps that area was darker), or perhaps you were trying to capture some element of form shading (though as discussed in Lesson 2, form shading should not play a role in our drawings in this course). Either way, moving forward as we restrict our use of this tool for cast shadows, we basically have to leave all form shading out, as well as all local colour, treating the objects like they're devoid of any colour at all, just made of the same consistent white.

• I noticed that when adding edge detail to the leaves in this drawing, you pretty frequently used a sort of S curve that zigzagged right across the leaf's existing edge. This is definitely something to avoid, as explained here. Keep each such mark on one side of that silhouette's edge, either cutting into the silhouette, or extending it, but never trying to do both at once. This is similar to what I've said previously - basically, it's in the interest of maintaining tight, specific relationships between your phases of construction.

• Admittedly I could be wrong, but this drawing seems similar in a lot of ways to the potato plant - especially in the fact that you've filled a seemingly arbitrary area with solid black - but if that is the case, then a lot more time observing each individual step of the demo would definitely have been required, as you seem to have gotten kind of derailed. That aside, I do want to clarify that at no point in the potato plant do we fill things in arbitrarily with black. Rather, in this step we're adding shadows to the areas where the foliage is dense enough that it would cover the soil in the spaces between those leaves. This on its own wouldn't be enough, but as we move through the demo, we go on to have the other leaves cast shadows as well. That's one of the major elements that are missing here in this drawing - if one thing casts a shadow, everything must cast a shadow, and so the dirt beneath the leaves should be getting lots of different shadow shapes. You do have some, but it appears to be limited only to leaves casting shadows on each other. Of these, you're having your cast shadows stick very close to the leaves' silhouettes, and you also happen to have them casting in a variety of directions. Cast shadows do not cling to the silhouette of the form casting them - you must be aware of the specific surface upon which they fall. And, of course, they must all be cast in the same direction, given that they'd be cast by the same light source.

Now, you do have a number of things to keep in mind, but by and large you're making good progress, and should be good to move onto the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.