Starting with your arrows, your base linework here is quite confident, which lays down a foundation to help establish how they move fluidly through the world. This is however somewhat impeded when you add line weight, as you generally do so with a bit more hesitation, focusing on tracing over these lines as they exist on the page, rather than doing so confidently, using the ghosting method. Of course, doing it confidently can often result in little deviations (which is why students are prone to hesitating here), but those mistakes are normal, and need to be accepted as part of the process. They'll go away with practice, but only if you allow them to happen.

That hesitation does carry over into your leaves, unfortunately - instead of being built around a central flow line that really pushes the sense of how each leaf moves through the space it occupies, the linework is a touch stiff, focusing more on how it exists flat against the page itself. One thing thata can help with this is to add a little arrow head on the tip of the flow line (you'll actually see me doing this in the diagram for this exercise). Doing this can help establish a mental link between this exercise and the arrows before it, helping you to focus more on how you're capturing not only a stiff, static object, but something that represents actual motion.

When it comes to building up more complex edge detail, you're generally doing this well, although I strongly urge you to avoid increasing the thickness of your linework as you progress through the phases of construction, as you've done here. This can encourage us to feel as though we're meant to redraw the entire leaf at each stage, instead of allowing the elements from earlier steps to stand for themselves where they can. Line weight can always be added in after the fact, but more towards establishing how different forms in the construction overlap one another, as shown here.

Lastly, when approaching construction in general, always focus on maintaining tight, specific relationships between each phase of construction. As I've highlighted on the right here, you've got an arbitrary gap between both existing sections of construction from previous stages, as you try and merge the sub-leafs together. Instead, you should be following the trajectory of the existing edges more closely, as shown on the right. This helps maintain a tighter relationship between those steps, and helps us transfer more of that solidity from the simpler stage forwards as we build up greater complexity.

Continuing onto your branches, you're generally doing a good job here, but I have a couple things for you to focus on:

• Be sure that every edge segment starts at the previous ellipse, continues past the next, and stops halfway to the third. You often fall short of extending fully to that midpoint, and on occasion you've got a few cases where you don't start far back enough either. This is intended to achieve a healthy overlap between the segments, which helps to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next.

• Also, when drawing the next segment, try to overlap the last chunk of the previous one, treating it like a runway, rather than drawing your new segment where the last one ought to have been. This will make things a bit harder, but it'll also allow you to benefit more from the exercise. You can see this demonstrated here in the instructions.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, overall you're doing fairly decently, though there are a few things I want to call out:

• Firstly, while you've done a great job when it comes to drawing every single little petal here in this cherry blossom, there are a couple things to keep an eye on. One comes down to the fact that with each of these petals, you started at a slightly more complex stage than you should have, as shown here. Additionally, you tended to leave gaps between the end of the flow line and the tip of next stage of the petal's construction - this is an arbitrary gap which results in a weaker relationship from one stage of construction to the next. Circling back to the first point about the skipped step, it's very clear to me that you chose to do this, and that you did know better. You were simply deciding that since you had so many petals to construct, eliminating one step would make that easier, and it would have been even more nightmarish to add yet another step to every single petal. Unfortunately, that is what this course requires of you - we are not allowed to skip any steps. What we can do however is choose to focus in on a specific section of the reference image - a particular cluster of flowers or leaves or what have you - in order to both explore them at a much greater size on the page (which itself also helps engage our whole arm while drawing, and also makes it easier to think through spatial problems). You choose the scale of the problem you wish to deal with - but once chosen, you are committed to exploring it in its entirety, with all of its steps, executing each and every mark to the best of your ability, regardless of whether it's one line of ten, or one line of a thousand. Of course, this means that we may not be able to complete a given drawing in the time that we have for a single sitting - but there's nothing that states you can't spread a single construction across multiple sittings and days, in order to fulfill our obligation of giving each construction as much time as it requires of us.

• Secondly, I can see that with this drawing you were following along with the hibiscus demo, but there are pretty significant discrepancies from the instructions shown in that demo video, and the steps you've followed here. On one hand, there's the matter of weaker relationships between the phases of construction. In the demo, we lay out the ellipse to start, which defines how far out our petals will extend. Then we draw our flow lines extending to the perimeter of that ellipse, and then the petal structures which end where their corresponding flow line does. All of these steps are tightly bound to one another - but you appeared to draw your ellipse, then drew your flow lines such that they shot past its perimeter, and then drew the individual petal structures such that they blew past the end of the flow lines as well. Furthermore, you also went pretty heavy with your filled areas of solid black, using it somewhat arbitrarily at times. That's something we're going to talk about a bit more in a moment, but in general when following along with a demonstration, it's best that you do just that - follow the demo, as closely as you can, and avoid your own experimentation. The purpose of a demo after all is to put yourself in the headspace of the instructor, and to tackle the problem as they do, so you can learn to apply that same methodology when working from your own references.

The last thing I want to talk about is how you're dealing with the 'detail' phase of your drawing - that is, once you're done with your construction. It seems that your focus is generally on 'decorating' your drawings, which effectively means that you're doing what you can to make them more visually pleasing, usually by looking for reasons to put down more ink. Unfortunately, decoration is not a very clear goal - there's no specific point at which "enough" decoration has been added, and so it often leaves us floundering for what to do next.

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.

As a result of this approach, you'll find yourself thinking less about excuses to add more ink, and instead you'll be working in the opposite - trying to get the information across while putting as little ink down as is strictly needed, and using those implicit markmaking techniques from Lesson 2 to help you with that.

Now, I am going to assign some minimal revisions, so you can apply what I've shared with you here and demonstrate your understanding before I move you onwards. You'll find them listed below.