Before I get started, I wanted to mention that the quantity of work assigned in a given lesson isn't intended to give you the kind of mileage that is necessarily going to result in growth and improvement. The point is to provide me with a body of work that demonstrates whether or not you understand all of the important points shared in the lesson. Do some students improve over the set? Absolutely - although it's more common to see that amongst students who are earlier on in their progress, and based on your work it's very clear that you've got a fair bit of experience already. As a result, you will likely feel as though you've plateaued for a while, although as what you learn accumulates under the surface, but you might not feel or notice it for a while.

Furthermore, I should note that it is not at all uncommon for students to describe their work as "bad" - and the vast majority of the time that a student self-reports that, it's about as specific about this "badness" as they can get. There's comfort there, in professing humility, in degrading one's efforts, and in claiming insufficiency. It's easier to be "bad", than to simply be.

I urge you to deny yourself that comfort, however. When you tell yourself your drawings are somehow bad, demand more specificity. Require yourself to point out exactly what's bad, what didn't quite make the cut. And if you can't, as will often be the case, then accept that such feelings cannot be trusted.

To all of that, I recommend that you set aside some time to watch (or rewatch) this video from Lesson 0, as it touches on all of these kinds of things, and why such comments are better left out from your submissions.

Alrighty! Jumping in with your arrows, you're off to a great start. You're capturing these with a great deal of confidence, which helps to sell the illusion of how they actually push through the world with a sense of fluidity. This carries over very well into your leaves, where you're capturing not only how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You are also handling your edge detail well, building it up one stroke at a time, and generally avoiding trying to capture too much edge detail all at once. This maintains a strong sense that you're introducing a simple, 3D structure into the world, then making little modifications to it - as opposed to just drawing lines on a flat page.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is fine as far as the exercise itself is concerned (which is focused on how the edges are drawn and layered atop one another), although there are two points that stood out to me:

• Firstly, you're not drawing through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen as required for all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.

• Secondly, it appears that you're generally maintaining a consistent degree for those ellipses, instead of shifting them wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the tube. You may want to review the Lesson 1 ellipses video if you're unsure as to why the degree would change.

Now, despite your non-specific concerns about the quality of your results, overall your work is very, very well done. There are a few points I want to call out, but they're all fairly minor.

• In a couple of spots on this plant (namely that bottom-right leaf, and the top of the flower pot), you ended up going back over your lines a ton. This is expressly against the core principles of this course, and based on the rest of your work, you're well aware of that. You will make mistakes, but it's important not to give into the temptation to try and correct them.

• When constructing cylindrical flower pots, be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line, which will help you in aligning the various ellipses you require to flesh out the structure.

• You had a tendency of getting a little sketchy along the right side of this construction as well.

• For the edge detail on this hibiscus' petals, you have a tendency to zigzag your edge detail on occasion, which is an issue you can read about in these notes.

• In this one your filled areas of solid black are quite scratchy/sketchy. When establishing a cast shadow shape you want to add to your drawing, be sure to first outline it, then fill it in. This two-step process allows us to mindfully and intentionally design that shape, with consideration to the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it. If however we paint it on stroke by stroke, we tend not to have a specific idea of what that shadow shape is supposed to be, making it all a lot muddier.

And that about covers it! Overall good work, though certainly some places where you need to remind yourself to adhere to the principles of markmaking from Lesson 1. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.