Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job of executing these with a fair bit of confidence throughout most of your linework. There is a little hesitation here and there, but for the most part you're conveying a strong sense of fluidity, capturing how they move through the world. This is present in your leaves to a point, but I feel the hesitation does increase here. When I see this from students, it's often because they're focusing very heavily on the fact that these are real objects that they're trying to capture, and so they focus primarily on capturing them accurately, rather than considering the actual way in which they move through the space that they occupy.

There are a couple suggestions I have to help with that:

• First off, remember that the leaves exercise is all about breaking things into stages. The flow line in the first step is all about capturing a sense of motion through the world. When we look at photographs, they often do tend to appear more stiff at first glance, because they're capturing something that is still. Your brain however does understand that these things move, they're flexible, there's gesture and energy to them, and so when your brain understands what it's looking at, it conveys that to you. But if you hyperfocus on a photo reference, you're just going to draw what is literally there, resulting in stiffness. So for this first step, focus only on exaggerating a sense of movement, thinking about the forces of wind, and the air currents that carry your leaf along. Then extend this into a flat shape in the second step, following the same flow as the initial line.

• I can see you adding little arrow heads at the tip of your flow lines - that's good, and can really help reinforce the sense of flow if you're already purposely mindful of it.

• Draw bigger. Some of these are actually getting quite small, which can really impede our brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage our whole arm while drawing (especially as beginners). Really push yourself to draw big, and use your whole arm from the shoulder.

Looking at how you're approaching the addition of edge detail and the more complex leaf structures, there are definitely cases where you're doing a good job with this, but I can see several where you're breaking away - this generally happens when you strive to get into more textural detail, which suggests to me that in doing so, you actually get distracted from doing what's needed on the constructional side of things first.

In these leaves, you end up effectively drawing new, complete leaves with thicker lines within the general space defined by the earlier phase of construction. That is, rather than actually taking the physical structure that currently exists in the scene, and modifying it to build up more complex structural detail. Think of it like this - the simple silhouette you have by the end of the second step is not abstract, nor is it just a plan or a scaffolding. Think of it as though you have a piece of paper in the world, in this shape. If you want to add a wavy pattern to its edge, you do not draw a separate thing occupying the same space, as you did with the ginkgo leaf (specifically at its tip, you end up breaking away from maintaining tighter, specific relationships as explained here - we see this in your oak leaf as well). Instead, you simply push parts of that piece of paper's edge up and down, creating rises and falls. Or, if you need to cut into it, you would cut a path with a pair of scissors - or in our case, draw the line those scissors would follow (as shown here).

One thing to avoid is this tendency of increasing the thickness of your lines as you progress through the stages of construction. This will also encourage you redraw more than is strictly necessary, resulting in those weaker relationships between the phases of construction. And, in cases like the ivy, when you find your desired leaf shape breaking too far from the previous stage of construction, consider building up more underlying structure by using the approach for a more complex leaf like this one.

Continuing onto your branches, these are largely well done, although a couple things to keep in mind:

• Draw through your ellipses three times at most - but two is better. Don't go around them until you lose track of the intended ellipse.

• Be sure to extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown here. You're generally pretty close, so I'm really just mentioning this as a reminder, as there are a couple spots where you fall a little short.

Continuing onto the plant constructions, your work here is largely well done, with a few quick points I want to call out:

• Again, watch your ellipses - you're losing track of what you're after in these tulip bulbs, especially towards the left.

• For the edge detail here, it does look like you were after a wavy pattern here rather than cuts - in that case, ensuring that those marks flow right out of, and back into, the existing edge is important rather than having a sharp corner where they begin.

• For the flower pot of your venus fly trap, don't use dashed/broken lines for anything in this course, and make sure that if something gets cut off, that you actually cap it off - in this case with another ellipse for the base - rather than leaving it open ended. Open shapes read as flat shapes, not solid forms.

• For all cylindrical flower pots (and cylindrical structures in general), be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line to help in aligning your ellipses. Also, be sure to add as many ellipses as are necessary to describe the entirety of a given structure - an ellipse inset within the opening to define the thickness of the rim, for instance. You did a better job of this with the snake plant and aloe vera, but not so much with the cuddly cactus (who names things like that?!) and the venus fly trap).

Before I finish this up, I wanted to quickly talk about how you're approaching texture, which you asked about in your submission. Right now, I think the issue comes down to this: your focus is currently on decoration, rather than texture. Where texture is specific - describing the presence of specific forms through the shadows they cast, decoration is more arbitrary, with there not being any clear point at which we've added "enough". It just becomes a general pursuit of making our drawings more visually pleasing, but lacking direction in pursuing it.

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.

Instead of focusing on decoration, what we draw here comes down to what is actually physically present in our construction, just on a smaller scale. As discussed back in Lesson 2's texture section, we focus on each individual textural form, focusing on them one at a time and using the information present in the reference image to help identify and understand how every such textural form sits in 3D space, and how it relates within that space to its neighbours. Once we understand how the textural form sits in the world, we then design the appropriate shadow shape that it would cast on its surroundings. The shadow shape is important, because it's that specific shape which helps define the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it.

So, what may help, is simply focusing on two things:

• Understand each specific textural form - don't worry about how long it'll take, or how many other forms are present. One form at a time. Look at it in your reference image, understand how it relates to its surroundings. Then decide what kind of shadow it ought to cast in your drawing.

• Less is more - don't worry about covering everything, or finding excuses to put more ink down. Try to get things across with as little as possible.

So, while you do have things to keep in mind here, you are largely ready to continue on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.