You see, the trick here is that students often feel a lot of... feelings. About their work. Some are very proud of their work, some feel continuously ashamed, holding themselves to certain standards and determining for themselves whether they feel like they've met them or not. But the fact of the matter is that your standards are irrelevant, and whether or not you feel satisfied with your work doesn't matter. Not here. This is my house, and only what I think holds any value here.

While there are a few things I felt were a bit questionable in terms of choices you've made, your work has been largely very well done. You've demonstrated a good grasp of construction as a whole, have demonstrated patience in your linework, have broken things down into their simplest components and have built them out as such. Now, Scylla's gone down to get burgers from our delivery guy, so I'm going to try and get through this critique with as little unnecessary nonsense as possible.

Your arrows are a decent start, but there are some small issues. I'm going to ignore your first two pages, as I know you did the third more recently, and they're definitely a bit better. I do however want to mention something they all have in common - that weird little forked end. Now it's not really that big of a deal, but I do want to stress the importance of following each exercise exactly as it's written, and adding as little of your own personal flair as possible. In the exercise, the ends are straight-cut, so that's what you should do. Again - not that big of a deal, but part of this exercise is about how the positive space (the ribbon itself) and the negative space (the distances between the zigzagging sections) behave in relation to one another as perspective applies to the arrow as a whole. Having a straight-cut end makes it just a little bit easier to focus on this.

So, to that point, I do want to point out that the spacing between your zigzagging sections - the negative space - doesn't appear to compress at nearly the same rate as the actual width of the ribbon section (the positive space). Your ribbon tends to get thin really quickly, but those spaces still maintain pretty big distances, giving a sense of inconsistency between the behaviour of the positive and negative space.

That aside, your arrows do flow very smoothly and fluidly through space, and this carries over nicely into your leaf exercises. While the flow of your leaves captures a good sense of how they move through the space they occupy (rather than just how they sit statically within that space), one thing that I'm not super fond of is how they appear to be drawn with two different kinds of marks. You initially go in with lines that are a little more hesitant and light, and then you go back over them with richer, darker strokes. When approaching constructions in this course, don't differentiate your linework like this. Every line you draw should be drawn with confidence, with respect for the structure that is being laid down. You'll go back in with line weight afterwards to emphasize certain key sections of existing lines, but this is once everything's already been laid down.

To the point of construction though, I am glad that you're adhering to the scaffolding structure laid down in previous phases of construction - you don't treat it like a loose suggestion, and instead build upon it directly. Nice work.

Your work on the branches is largely coming along pretty well. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement - there always is with this exercise, as it's more challenging than one would expect to get those segments to run together properly, but I'm glad that you're following the instructions correctly. There are two things to keep in mind:

• Keep trying to maintain a consistent width throughout the full length of the branch forms, avoid pinching or swelling. This will ensure it reads as a solid form.

• Make a point of drawing your next segment right over the last section of the previous one, treating it as a sort of runway that you overlap directly before shooting off onto the next target. This way you're forced to deal with situations where that previous segment goes off track as it comes to an end, instead of drawing where it ought to have been. We learn and develop our skills more quickly when we're forced to deal with the results of our previous mark.

Getting into your plant constructions, these are frankly very well done. You build everything out through entirely simple structures, and you build up the complexity in stages. You're still maintaining the smooth fluidity of your petals and leaves, but the rest of the structures feel entirely solid in comparison, resulting in a nice balance of flow and sturdiness, with all of them relating to one another in 3D space, rather than as flat shapes on the page.

There are just a couple things I want to point out:

• On this page, your leaves tend to break away from how in previous drawings you follow the underlying structure from the previous phase of construction more directly, resulting in you zigzagging your edge detail as explained here. You shouldn't be zigzagging those lines, and your edge detail should be built up in separate strokes, all rising off the previous structure and returning to it.

• Your flower pots all tend to be really simplistic - which itself is fine, except for the fact that you have a tendency to construct them as having no actual thickness. If you look at the pine cone cactus - which otherwise was drawn really well - it's sitting in what appears to be a paper-thin container, like a chinese takeout box with no actual thickness to it, and no lip around its mouth. You can achieve this impression of thickness by placing edges slightly inset within the mouth, creating an additional strip of planes. Also, as a more minor note - don't colour in anything other than actual cast shadow shapes. Negative space, or things that appear to be of a darker colour, should be left alone. We toss out all local colour information in favour of treating it all like it's just a flat white instead.

As a side note, I really liked your venus fly trap drawing. I thought the light touch of texture was very effective, and you built out those bitey tacos very nicely. Do however try and reduce your usage of contour lines in the future - try and think about what each contour line is actually accomplishing, and only put them down where they're really contributing something to the drawing. It's pretty normal to want to throw them down haphazardly, but they really do suffer from diminishing returns, where the second is less impactful than the first, and the third even less so.

Anyway! All in all, very nice work where it counts most. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.