Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of drawing these with a good deal of confidence, and it helps to really sell the way in which each one flows through the three dimensions of space. This carries over quite nicely into your leaves, where you're not only capturing how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy.

When it comes to the addition of more complex edge detail, you're generally doing a good job, but I am noticing a tendency to try and redraw the entirety of the existing leaf's silhouette. When employing this constructional sort of technique, remember that we're not redrawing the whole structure at each stage - every step merely introduces the parts that have changed, through marks that rise off the existing silhouette and return to it as seamlessly as we can manage. You can see this demonstrated here.

This is also something I noticed in your plant drawings as well - for example, here we can see how there's two distinct leaves laid right on top of one another. The earlier, lighter one, and then the darker one from later on. You are doing a good job of trying to maintain fairly tight relationships between the different phases of construction (which is integral to carrying forward the solidity from the earlier steps as we increase the overall complexity). That said, when you attempt to redraw the entire leaf at each step, you end up dangerously susceptible to zigzagging back and forth across the existing silhouette - not something you end up doing very much, but there are little signs of it here and there. To the same point, you'll also want to avoid making later stages of construction darker, and earlier ones lighter - this'll encourage you to go back over things where otherwise there's no real need for it. Line weight itself can be added towards the end of a construction, focusing primarily on clarifying how different forms overlap (limiting that line weight to where the overlaps actually occur, as shown in this example).

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is coming along well, though you are definitely making each individual instance a lot more challenging than they need to be, having them all bend as they do. Jumping into a higher level of complexity right from the get go can actually make things harder than it needs to be, because you're immediately giving yourself many more things to worry about simultaneously. Working first with simpler, straighter branch structures can help you get the core technique down more solidly, before increasing the complexity.

In terms of the use of the technique itself, you're generally doing well, but I have a couple quick suggestions/reminders:

• Make sure that you're cognizant of how the degree of each ellipse reflects its orientation in space relative to the viewer. This is something we discussed back in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, so you can check that out if you're unsure what I mean.

• When drawing your edge segments, use the last 'tail' of the previous one as a runway, overlapping it directly before shooting off towards the next target, instead of drawing that segment where the previous one ought ot have been. This will certainly make it a bit harder, but it'll also make the exercise more beneficial and more efficient, forcing you to learn from your mistakes more directly.

• Also, always make sure y ou're extending each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown here. You generally do, but at those particularly sharp bends, sometimes you fall short.

Moving onto your plant constructions, as a whole you're doing quite well. Aside from that issue with replacing too much of your leaves' previous constructional stages, the only other issue I want to touch upon relates to the question you yourself asked - so let's jump right into it.

As explained here in Lesson 2, no form shading should be included in your drawings for this course. Any situation where a surface gets darker based on its own orientation relative to the light source (and when it gets lighter/darker based on that orientation changing) is form shading. What we are incorporating into our drawings are much more specific - cast shadows are always created based on one form blocking the light from reaching another surface. Therefore the specific shadow shapes we draw are always themselves representative of the relationship between those elements, and require us to consciously think about the nature of the casting form and the receiving surface. That's what makes texture so challenging - we have to understand how these things exist in 3D space in relation to one another, in order to craft each shadow shape appropriately, but without being able to draw the form in the first place.

To that point, I will mention that in a few drawings - like this one - you employed filled areas of solid black that were kind of arbitrary, not defining such a relationship between forms and surfaces. Try to reserve your filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only. You may have been a little confused by the potato plant demo - but even there, where we seem to fill in the "negative" spaces (the gaps between our forms), we were actually drawing the shadows being cast onto the dirt below. It just so happens that the foliage was dense enough there to cover those areas completely, making it seem like we were just filling things in more arbitrarily.

Since all our filled shadow shapes define these specific relationships, it means that even when we reach the "detail" phase of our drawings, we're not simply seeking to decorate things, or to make ur drawings more aesthetically pleasing. Decoration itself is more vague as a goal, since there's no clear point at which we've added "enough" decoration.

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.

For the most part you haven't gotten too much into that, though I did notice that kind of impression in this cactus in particular. Here it seems that you weren't exactly sure what should be motivating the marks you were putting down, leading you to focus more on general decoration. As a result, we ran into more instances where wanted to add form shading, and therefore employed more generic/arbitrary texture to achieve a transition from light to dark. Those textural marks didn't actually imply the presence of specific textural forms, however, and so the driving force here was the desire to shade - not the desire to communicate textural forms to the viewer.

With that addressed, there's one more minor thing I wanted to call out - and it's not really an issue in the context of this lesson, but it would be more of one as we move forwards. In that same cactus drawing, you've constructed solid, voluminous, thick structures, then altered their silhouettes in the way we do with our leaves. This alteration of the silhouette, however, is actually a problem. It flattens out the resulting structure, taking something that once had volume, and reducing it to more of a two dimensional entity.

This is totally fine for leaves, because they're already flat. But it's not something we can employ as readily for structures that have more thickness and volume to them. You can read more about this in these notes, which also explains how we might achieve more complex structures instead.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. As a whole you're doing a great job, and I can see you applying the principles to the lesson to fairly solid effect. Keep up the good work.