Starting with your arrows, you've done a lovely job in executing these with a great deal of confidence, which goes a long way to push the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. This carries over quite nicely 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.

One small correction though - in this more complex leaf structure, you should be building each individual "arm" in its entirety, as a complete but simple leaf structure, then merge them together as demonstrated here and here.

Continuing onto your branches, you've generally done this decently, although I am noticing some discrepancies in how you're building up your edges. Note that in the instructions it shows that each segment starts at one ellipse, continues past the second and stops halfway to the next. The next segment then starts at the previous ellipse and repeats the pattern. This is important - it leads to a healthy overlap between them, which in turn allows for a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. You get this correct sometimes, but there are definitely inconsistencies that suggest you may not be following this as closely as you should.

Moving onto your plant constructions, by and large your work here is done well, although there are a few things I want to call to your attention.

• Firstly, remember - we never add more complexity than can be supported at any given point. There are a number of little points - for example, the leaf at the top of your pitcher plant, the section at the top of the plant on the left side of this page, and so on where you're adding more complexity too soon. Build up to this in stages. Here's an example on another student's work that demonstrates the concept of using successive stages to build up to a desired level of complexity.

• Secondly, remember that edge detail should not zigzag back and forth acros the existing edge. In general, the process of adding edge detail is not one that replaces the existing edge, but rather builds on top of it. That means you're always striking a balance between trying to add all the detail that is present in your reference, and trying to maintain the solidity of the structure by avoiding changing too much all at once.

• Also a minor point, but an important one - edge detail is structural, and thus part of the constructional aspect of what we're doing. It does not fall into the texture we add once the construction is laid out. I did notice that you tended to leave your non-detailed constructions to a pretty limited level of complexity, and there definitely was more structure that could have been achieved.

That brings me to my last point - right now when you do get into more detail, it seems that at least to a point, your focus lies primarily on decoration. Decoration is effectively the goal of making a drawing more visually pleasing - but it's not a clear goal, as there's no specific point at which one has added enough.

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.

And that about covers it. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to keep these points in mind going forward.