Starting with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job here of drawing them with confidence - aside from a touch of hesitation here and there. It shows that you are certainly able to draw these with a focus on how they move fluidly through the world, but that you do need to keep an eye on how closely you're adhering to the principles of markmaking, as you are prone to slipping back and ending up with slightly wobblier lines, especially towards the bottom of the page, if you lose focus.

Both in terms of the benefits of the confidence, and the issues relating to hesitating - carry over into your leaves. As such, you're capturing to a point how they sit statically in 3D space as well as how they move through the space they occupy, although this can be improved. Remember - the flow line itself has a job to do. It defines both how long the given leaf structure will be, as well as how it actually moves through the world. If it's drawn without consideration to fluidity, then it will come out feeling flat. If however you draw it while thinking about it as a representation of force and movement, then it will flow more smoothly and confidently, capturing not only how the leaf sits there in three dimensions, but also how it actually moves from moment to moment.

When it comes to adding more complexity, I did notice a few issues:

• In regards to more basic edge detail, just be sure to give yourself more time in the execution of each stroke. You want each addition to seamlessly rise off the existing edge, and return to it, to give the impression of it being an extension of that 3D structure's silhouette. Small overshoots, or gaps, will break that illusion and remind the viewer that what they're looking at is just lines on a flat page.

• For this one, you seemed to be undecided in terms of how you wanted to tackle it - whether you wanted to build it out as a complex leaf structure (where we create the basic footprint, and then build up flow lines within it and then construct leaf structures around those, finally merging them together at the end as demonstrated here and here, or if you wanted to approach it as edge detail by cutting back into the basic silhouette as shown here. Given that you did draw the flow lines (although they should be extending right to the perimeter of the basic silhouette, so as to maintain tight, specific relationships between the stages of construction), you then pivoted back to the other approach, leaving yourself somewhere in the middle. If you lay down flow lines, you should be constructing leaf structures around them, then merging them together at the end - again, as shown here.

As a whole, be sure to execute your marks with more confidence, and give the markmaking process for your edge detail more time.

Continuing onto your branches, I'm steadily seeing that hesitation increase, and more signs that you may be drawing the ellipses at least from your wrist. These issues, pertaining to things from Lesson 1, are very important, as they can serve to hinder us as we move into more complex topics. For all these structural marks, it's critical that you:

• Draw using your whole arm, from the shoulder, not from your wrist.

• Use the ghosting method to ensure that you're not trying to do everything at once, but rather break the process up across the planning, preparation, and execution stages - ultimately committing yourself and pushing through regardless of your fears of making a mistake as soon as that pen touches the page. It's the planning phase that receives the bulk of your time.

As far as the execution of the exercise itself, just a couple things:

• Be sure to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen - you often stop under 2x, sometimes at 1.5, which shows that you understand that you should be doing the full 2 turns, but that you're not entirely aware of the actions you're taking. This is not an uncommon issue with students but something you need to act on and address.

• Remember that the degree of the ellipses should be shifting wider as discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video. Right now you're keeping them all at the same general width/degree.

• Be sure to have each edge segment extend fully halfway to the next ellipse - you frequently fall a little short.

Moving onto your plant constructions, I'm going to keep this part brief, as I feel the points I've called out already touch upon the major issues we want to be addressing. For now, I'm just going to call out one remaining concern.

When you finish your construction and push into the "detail" phase of things, it seems that your priority shifts mainly to one of decoration. That is, you pull information directly from observation from your reference and try to apply it to your drawing with a focus on making it as visually pleasing and interesting as you can manage. Unfortunately decoration is not the goal we're after, as it's not a particularly clear one. There's no specific point, after all, where one has added "enough" decoration.

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.

While you'll want to review the Lesson 2 texture material in general, here are two important areas to focus on:

• These notes about why form shading is not something we include in our drawings for this course

• These reminders about how we employ reference image for texture

You'll find your revisions assigned below.