Starting with your arrows, you've done a pretty good job here of drawing them with a fair bit of confidence, helping to drive the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. This does by and large translate fairly well into your leaves exercise - you're capturing not only how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, the connection to the arrows exercise is really what will help make those leaves even more lively. One suggestion is to add a little arrow head on the tip of the flow line, to really drive home how it's meant to represent a sense of motion, rather than just a static element.

I did notice that you only appeared to tackle the third step of the exercise (adding edge detail) on three of your leaves here. While you do appear to have done so fairly well (although I would avoid making those later marks thicker/darker, try to stick to roughly the same line thickness), there's a lot of missed opportunities with all of the leaves where you did not go beyond step 2. Keep in mind that this third step is not optional - only the 4th one where we add texture is. Rather, building up edge detail here is an important aspect of this exercise, as it is the first introduction to the step-by-step approach to constructional drawing exercises. Be sure not to skip such things in the future, as there's no good reason to do so.

Continuing onto your branches, you're by and large handling these fairly well, but I have two points for you to keep in mind:

• Be sure to extend each edge segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as demonstrated in the instructions. This helps us to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one edge to the next through the greater overlap between the segments.

• Keep in mind that the degree of your ellipse should be shifting as we slide along the length of the branch structures - generally a good rule of thumb is that as we move farther along the tube, the ellipses will get wider, though this is also influenced by how the branch itself turns through space. You can review the Lesson 1 ellipses video if you're unsure why that is.

Moving onto your plant constructions, by and large you've done a great job here. Your constructions are solid, and you're building up the structures from simple complex in a very cohesive manner. I really have one main area of advice to offer, and it's in many ways quite superficial. When it comes to the core focus of this course, you're doing very well.

So the point I want to discuss is what happens when you've finished your construction, and are figuring out how to add detail. As it stands, it seems that you're not entirely sure what to strive for when it comes to that detail, and what purpose towards which you should be adding it in the first place. This results in you slipping back to thinking more about detail as "decoration" - in other words, the construction's over, let's do what we can to make the drawing as visually pleasing as we can.

Unfortunately, decoration simply isn't that concrete of a goal. There's no clear point at which we've added "enough" decoration, and so this can leave us simply looking for excuses to put more ink, more marks down. 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.

Of course, these are all things you can work on as you move onto the next lesson - so, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete! Keep up the great work.