Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of drawing these with a great deal of confidence, which helps convey the force with which those arrows move through space. One thing to keep in mind however is that as we look farther back, the gaps between the zigzagging sections should be compressing to better show the depth and perspective of the scene, as shown here.

Continuing onto your leaves, I think you ended up focusing more on how these leaves would lay flat in space, so we don't really get the same kind of fluidity we did from the arrows. Instead we get a greater impression of how the leaves sit statically in the world, rather than how they move through the space they occupy. When doing this exercise in the future, I recommend that you don't worry too much about basing it directly off your reference image - focus first and foremost on creating a structure that flows through space like the arrows did, then use the reference images to help inform the more complex edge detail/textural information you want to build upon the existing structure.

There are a few other things I want you to keep in mind:

• When adding more complex edge detail, you're generally doing a good job of sticking close to the existing structure from the previous phase of construction, but make sure that you're not redrawing things that don't need to be redrawn. Focus only on adding the parts that change (as shown here), and keep the thickness of your lines roughly consistent from one phase of construction to the next. When it comes to the use of line weight, we employ it primarily as its own separate pass at the end of a construction to clarify how different forms overlap one another in specific, localized areas, as shown here.

• The upper-middle leaf is definitely skipping a lot of steps of construction. There are some notes about this issue here, but you will also find that this demonstration from the informal demos page tackles a similar kind of leaf.

• When tackling texture, you end up using a lot of different strategies, focusing on different things, and as a whole I think you may be forgetting some of the points mentioned in Lesson 2. When capturing texture, what we're doing is basically focusing on implying the presence of textural forms. We do this strictly by drawing filled, solid, black shapes, each of which represent specific cast shadows, with their shape being designed in such a way to imply the presence of that form. You focused on this most in the bottom left leaf, but in the upper middle leaf you focused instead on form shading (which as discussed here is not going to be something you employ in this course). In the upper right, you focused more on lines/outlines rather than cast shadows (employing explicit markmaking instead of implicit), and in the bottom right you got kind of scrambled and maybe relied much more on randomness rather than specific, intentionally designed shadow shapes.

Moving onto your branches, there's definitely some good success here (bottom left is coming along really well), but there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Draw through each of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, make sure you're drawing them from the shoulder even when they're small, and employ the ghosting method (the 3 step process of planning, preparation, execution) for every mark.

• Make sure you're extending each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown here. This will help you achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one segment to the next.

• Generally you'll be able to maintain a more solid overall structure if you try to keep each individual branch to a consistent width throughout its whole length. Avoid having them get wider or narrower. If you need a branch to change in its width in a construction later on, you'd basically start with a branch of a consistent width, then build on top of it to add the bulk in a later step.

• The degree of your ellipses aren't to be chosen randomly - as explained in the lesson 1 ellipses video, their degree conveys how that cross-section is oriented in space.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, you've got a variety of results here. Some are coming along well, employing the principles of construction effectively, while others get a little derailed by priorities that stray from what this course is focused on.

With this earlier flower, you're doing pretty well at constructing all of the petals one at a time, drawing through your forms to understand how they all exist in space and how they relate to one another, and are generally using the tools introduced in this course effectively. There are a couple of small things to keep in mind though:

• Make sure that your petal/leaf ends where the flow line ends. Do not leave an arbitrary gap between them, or at least avoid it to the best of your ability. Mistakes are normal, but make sure that you're intending to have no such gap.

• Your use of line weight is getting a little mixed up with your use of cast shadows. As discussed earlier in this critique, the purpose of line weight is to clarify specific, localized overlaps, rather than to trace over a long section of a given form. Additionally, line weight is generally kept quite subtle - we don't go overboard with thickening a line, because this can take a three dimensional structure and flatten it out into a more graphic shape (due to the emphasis on the outline, which technically doesn't exist in reality). Sometimes students end up overly thickening their line weight because they confuse it with cast shadows, but there are key differences. Cast shadows cannot run along the silhouette of a form in the way that line weight does - it has to be cast onto another surface, regardless of how far it is. With some of the petals in the middle of the flower, you ended up creating the impression that there are cast shadows there which are floating arbitrarily in space.

Your drawing of the hibiscus was similarly well done. Just watch out for those edge details that are too complex - like the bottom most petal, where you're adding an edge with a lot more of its own bumps to it. Instead, you should be building those up in separate constructional steps, as you can see in this example from another student's work.

As you push on through the set of constructions, I feel like your focus shifts more from the construction element more to creating pretty drawings. The amount of time you invest into each individual step decreases, as your priority moves onto the detail phase. Furthermore, you seem to be considering that detail phase as a more as being an opportunity to decorate your drawing. Decoration as a goal has some issues - because decoration itself is more of a subjective, arbitrary thing, it's hard to pin down when you've accomplished it.

Instead, 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.

So, every single mark you put down should still be working towards the goal of communicating forms that are present in the scene - things you can feel by touch, rather than see with your eyes.

Because your focus shifts in this manner, I think you also end up skipping some steps. For example,

• In this page you were no longer constructing your trunks around a central minor axis line, as per the branch technique.

• On that same page, you didn't draw through the flower pot itself, causing it to appear quite a bit flatter. When constructing any sort of a cylindrical structure, construct it around a central minor axis line to help align any ellipses required to one another - then be sure to draw all the ellipses you require to define the various cross-sections, in their entirety. The opening, the base, another one inset within the opening to suggest the thickness of the rim itself (since these things are not paper-thin), and whatever other ellipses you may need to define the other more unique aspects of the structure. In this case while the base is obviously cut off along the bottom, you wouldn't end up drawing the actual base, but you should still cap off the bottom of the structure to reinforce the form's three dimensional nature. Leaving it open ended will make it appear flat.

As a whole I am confident that your skills are coming along just fine, but I want to make sure that moving forward you understand what I mean here in terms of the priorities of the course, and the distinction between texture and decoration. I'm going to assign some limited revisions below, so you can demonstrate your understanding.