Honestly, I'm kind of glad you took screenshots. Generally PDFs are a pain to critique. While the reduced resolution can be a little annoying, I still prefer that to having to scroll through a PDF where I can't link directly to specific pages. I also appreciate the use of the word "dumby". It's something I call people in my head, but I don't say it outloud because I didn't think it was commonly used!

Anywho, starting with your arrows, you've done a good job of drawing these with a fair bit of confidence, although there are a few places where your linework gets a little more hesitant. Hesitation leads to wobbles, wobbles adds complexity to a form's silhouette, and that complexity will undermine the illusion of solidity that we're trying to create - so keep an eye on that. Also, be sure to compress the gaps between zigzagging sections as we look farther back to capture a greater sense of depth in the scene, as shown here.

Moving onto your leaves, you are doing a decent job here, although I feel the sense of fluidity and movement of the flow lines could be improved. This is essentially just like the arrows exercise - we're capturing the sense that this line or shape is moving through three dimensions. One thing I find can help is to add a little arrowhead on the end of the flow line to remind us ofo this.

When it comes to the structure, you're building those additional bumps and variation right onto the existing structure, which is good to see. This adheres nicely to the principles of construction, as you're solving one problem at a time, and then adhering to the choices made previously, rather than trying to give new answers.

Onto the branches, I think here you may have missed an important aspect of the instructions. While you're extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, you're supposed to then start the next segment at the previous ellipse, allowing for a healthy overlap between them which as explained here helps achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, the points I've raised above definitely continue to play a role, although you're also generally adhering to many of the core principles of construction fairly well. What I believe is holding you back the most is that your linework feels just a little bit hesitant (something I called out in regards to your arrows early on). One thought that I did have is that it's possible you may simply be pressing a little too hard on your pen.

I'm not 100% sure of this - scanners often have a tendency to boost the contrast on images (there are usually settings to keep this from happening, but it depends from scanner to scanner), which eliminates a lot of the nuance - but overall the highly uniform nature of the linework and the slight hesitancy is why I'm drawing this conclusion. When we press too hard, it can have a few negative impacts:

• Firstly, because of the added resistance from the pace, we end up drawing slower, which gives us more room for our pen to wobble a little as we draw, often in very small ways (but enough to mess with the flow of the mark).

• Secondly, the overly uniform appearance can also make a drawing feel stiff and dead. The natural tapering of marks drawn more confidently, with a lighter touch, tends to give a greater impression of life, as explained here.

There are a few other significant issues I noticed:

In this sacred datura I'm seeing more instances of you zigzagging certain parts of your edge detail, and in general it just seems like a bit of a mess, especially with all of the arbitrary lines you've added (I assume to capture texture/detail). Here's how I'd handle that kind of flower. As I draw the edge detail, I'm still thinking about how this disc exists in 3D space, and I'm making a point not to zigzag any complex detail across the disc structure. Every individual addition of edge detail is still a relatively simple mark. When it comes to the additional detail, don't forget the principles from lesson 2 - specifically, avoiding working with individual lines, and remembering that all texture is made up of cast shadows, and therefore your textural marks should be cast shadow shapes.

That last point about texture brings me to another pretty major issue in your last few drawings. The key issue here is that once you jump into detail, you appear to be treating it more like the goal is to "decorate" your drawing. This isn't super useful to us because "decoration" isn't a clear goal. It's more of a direction, but you don't really know when you're done.

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.

If every single textural mark we capture is itself a cast shadow shape, being cast by some specific textural form, then it puts a lot of limitations on what exactly it is we can draw on the page. For example, all of the extra ink you added to the lower parts of these mushrooms' stems, can't possibly be cast shadows - instead, that leaves us a couple options.

It might be form shading - which we discussed back in lesson 2, stating that form shading would not be a part of the drawings we do in this course.

Or it might be an attempt at capturing the local colour or patterning - maybe you saw parts that were darker, but didn't assess what the source of that darkness was. Ultimately because we are limited to just drawing with black, or leaving the page white, we simply don't have the means to capture colour. It is therefore best to just ignore colour altogether and treat our object like it's only covered in the same flat white.

Circling back to the texture section of Lesson 2, that's why it's important that we focus on identifying the textural forms that are present, and determining what kind of shadows they'd cast. Right now it looks more like you focused on looking at your reference very carefully, and where you perceived there to be something you could capture a mark, you would draw such a mark. This skips over the important step of determining what form you were identifying in your reference (if any), and determining how that form should be implied in your reference.

When we get too caught up in decorating our drawings, it leads us away from the goals introduced in previous lessons. At no point in this course will you be asked to do anything that will focus on making the end resulting drawing something pretty or impressive. Each drawing is itself just an exercise in spatial reasoning - either on a macro level (via construction) or on a micro level (with texture).

Now I've shared a number of things for you to work on. I'll assign some pages of revision below, so you can work through them and demonstrate your understanding.