Starting with your arrows, these are definitely flowing very nicely through space, with a strong sense of fluidity and confidence to them. This is however something that is a little more muted in your leaves, where your initial flow lines don't quite carry the same sense of energy and force. It is incredibly important to remember always that the flow lines represent how your leaves actually move through all three dimensions of space. It's easy to get caught up in thinking about how they're just lines across a flat page, and that can come through in flattening out the leaves themselves. One thing that can help with this is to put a little arrowhead at the end of your flow lines, to really force the idea that it's capturing movement.
Aside from that, you're approaching the construction of your leaves on top of those flow lines quite well. When it comes to texture though, remember the principles from lesson 2. All texture is made up of little forms, and the things we see are the shadows those forms cast on their surroundings, not simple lines. In order to hammer this home, make a point of always capturing your textural marks using the two-step process described here. It'll help you avoid capturing texture with basic lines. Also, always use reference to inform your textural marks, because your visual library simply will not contain enough information at this stage to believably reproduce a texture that doesn't come off as oversimplified and cartoony.
Moving onto your branches, aside from not quite extending your line segments fully halfway to the next ellipse in a number of cases, you're doing a great job of getting those segments to flow smoothly and seamlessly from one to the next. There are just two things I want you to keep an eye on here:
You're drawing all of your ellipses with the same degree, and you're definitely not thinking about what that degree tells the viewer about how that cross-sectional slice is oriented in 3D space relative to the viewer. It is critical that you think about this, and consider that relationship between the slice and the viewer to decide whether the ellipse should be narrow or wide.
Try and keep the width of your branches consistent throughout its length - avoid any arbitrary tapering or swelling, as this will add complexity to the structure and will undermine it solidity.
Continuing onto your plant constructions, you've largely done a pretty solid job, but there are a few things I want to call out here as well:
For the leaves on the plant on the left side of this page, there are a number of areas where you added the wavy edge detail with a single stroke that zigzags back and forth around the previous phase of construction. As explained here, you should be drawing each bump separately, rising off and returning to the previous phase of construction. Also, remember that you shouldn't be trying to redraw the entirety of the form in each phase of construction, instead only drawing the parts that change. Generally you've done this correctly, but this is one of the few cases where you slipped up.
On the left side of this page you did an EXCELLENT job constructing that flower pot, aside from one thing - make sure you construct forms like that around a central minor axis line, in order to help you align your ellipses together.
The points I mentioned about texture definitely apply quite strongly to the mushroom on this page. The cactus on the right is actually a fair bit better, but texture as a whole does appear to be an area in which you're struggling. For the plant on the left side of this page, it becomes clear that you're getting more 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.
Aside from those points, your work is coming along fairly well. Do be sure to continue working on ensuring that your petals and leaves convey a sense of fluidity (though you did improve upon this in your plant constructions), but you are by and large ready to move on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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