Starting with your arrows, great work - you're drawing them with a great deal of confidence and fluidity, capturing how they move through space. Just remember to compress the gaps between the zigzagging sections as we look farther back in space, as explained here. This will help you capture a greater sense of depth.

You're doing a good job of applying that same confidence and fluidity to your leaves, capturing not only how they sit statically in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, when it comes to adding more complex edge detail, there is one key issue that comes up: it seems like you're approaching each successive phase of construction as an opportunity to redraw the leaf in its entirety. This is incorrect.

Instead, construction is about building upon the results of the previous phase - instead of redrawing the entire structure, we build right upon the simple leaf silhouette, only adding the pieces that change as shown here. Now, there are cases where you do appropriately just add one little bump at a time - but cases like this one have you basically going back over the entire outline, which leaves you more susceptible to zigzagging edge detail. Drawing later phases of construction with more pressure and line weight can often encourage this kind of mistake - so try to keep the thickness of your lines consistent from step to step, instead adding a step at the end to add line weight to clarify how certain forms overlap one another (rather than going back over the whole thing).

Also worth mentioning, with this one, remember that each phase of construction answers certain questions - for example, the original simple leaf silhouette you built up answers how far out the little individual "arms" would extend. With that answer given, it is your responsibility to adhere to it, rather than contradicting it with a new, different answer as you did here. In general here, this leaf wasn't particularly well done - you didn't maintain tight relationships between the phases of construction (leaving a lot of open, arbitrary gaps), and you didn't really take as much time and care in going through the leaf construction steps for each individual arm as you could have.

Continuing onto your branches, while at a glance your results are pretty solid, your actual adherence to the specific process laid out in the instructions is kind of... lacking. It's just very loose, as though you had a general idea of what you were supposed to be drawing, and then set the instructions aside to figure it out your own way. So as a result, you've got some lines that just run the full length of a given branch (rather than actually following the purpose of the exercise, which is to create a single continuous edge through several separate marks). There are also plenty of cases where you didn't extend your line segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, resulting in a shorter overlap between them. You'll find the specific instructions for this exercise laid out fairly succinctly here.

Don't just strive to mimic the end result - the steps of any given exercise are important, moreso than how things look when they're done.

Aside from points I've already raised, your plant constructions are generally coming along well. There are just a few things I want to point out - although they are still important:

• From what I can see, you appeared to be breaking at least parts of your drawings into two separate steps, sometimes opting to put some fainter lines down to kind of "figure things out", and then going back over things with a much darker stroke to commit to your lines. This is not the approach we use in this course. Instead, every single mark we draw, from the beginning to the end, is itself meant to be a commitment. We do not draw anything faintly, as if to try and hide it, because every mark provides an answer about the object and forms we're constructing.

• Extending off the previous point, most of that issue came from a misunderstanding of the role line weight plays in the process. Line weight is a specific tool, serving a specific purpose. We use it primarily to clarify how specific forms overlap one another in specific, localized areas. It helps provide some organization and structure, but generally you want to avoid going back over the entire silhouette of a given form for two reasons. Firstly, it's going to flatten out your drawing by turning each form into a graphic shape. Secondly, it'll encourage you to "trace" back over those lines, focusing on how they move across the flat page, rather than how they behave as edges moving through 3D space. Focusing on localized areas allows us to more easily draw those marks confidently, using the ghosting method (as we should for all of our marks). Here's an example of line weight used effectively, to clarify how some leaves overlap one another.

• The last point I wanted to raise is just to recommend how you should employ those areas of filled black to get the most out of them. All our drawings are focused on one thing - communicating information to the viewer. It's not to look pretty, not to have something to pin to the fridge. Well, really, the drawings are exercises in spatial reasoning, but by communicating how these objects exist in space, we're able to train our spatial reasoning skills. So, coming back to the point, everything we use in our drawings is going to be a tool for communication - kind of how I described line weight. Big filled shapes are similarly a tool, and by limiting them only to a specific use case, we can keep our drawings consistent to avoid confusing the viewer. To that point, when working through this course, reserve your filled black shapes for capturing cast shadows only. Avoid form shading, and avoid capturing any local colours (like when something is of a darker material, you may feel inclined to fill it in with black - don't). Ensure that every filled shape is itself designed with the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving it, in mind.

Now, while your plant constructions themselves are coming along well, I do want you to do a little more on the leaves and branches to address the points I raised previously, so I'll assign a fairly minor revision below.