Jumping right in with your arrows, you're off to a great start. You've captured these with a great deal of confidence and fluidity, really emphasizing how they move through all three dimensions of the world. This carries over into your leaves as well, when drawing those initial simple leaf structures (steps 1 and 2), you not only capture how they sit statically in the world, but also how they move through the space they occupy.
That said, I am noticing that when you get into more complex edge detail for those leaves, you tend to treat the earlier, simpler structure, as more of a sketch or a "suggestion", and you pretty much end up redrawing a whole new leaf on top of it. That's not what we're doing here - it results in a looser, weaker relationship between what should be considered solid, three dimensional structures in a 3D world.
So for example, if we look at this one in particular, the main problem is that you're leaving a lot of gaps in between the different stages of construction. You've built that basic leaf shape correctly, but then when you went to draw the "sub-arms", you drew their flow lines so they stopped at an arbitrary point beyond the edge of that previous, existing structure. Instead, as you can see in the example here, those flow lines should stop right at the edge of the existing structure's silhouette.
Constructional drawing itself is an approach that relies heavily on ensuring that the relationships between each phase are as specific, and as tight as possible, so that the solidity that the earlier phases maintain through their simplicity is able to carry forward even as we build up to greater levels of complexity.
For the top-left leaf on that same page (where you tackled what is most likely a sort of maple leaf), we actually have a detailed demonstration on how to tackle this kind of problem.
There are a few other issues as well:
Your linework is pretty erratic. In the same example I used above, the lines are quite scratchy and inconsistent, which shows that you're definitely not employing the principles of the ghosting method here, which is all about breaking the process into distinct stages. First planning (where we actually gauge what we want to get out of the mark we're going to make, where it should go, etc.), then preparation (going through the motion of making that mark so we can push it down into our muscle memory), then finally a singular, confident execution, without any hesitation.
You also get very caught up in the detail phase of these, in a way that suggests that your focus goes more towards decoration - that is, doing what you can to make the drawing more visually appealing. Decoration itself is a rather vague goal to strive for, since there's no specific point at which one has 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. Neither are we going out of our way to perfectly reproduce the reference image - given the limitation in tools (the fact that we're working with strictly black and white with no inbetweens), that would be an impossible goal. Instead, try to focus on capturing the points I listed above, while using less ink, rather than more, when possible. When students are more focused on decoration, they're more likely to lean into putting more marks down, because that mentality emphasizes the idea that "more is better". This leads to less planning and less thought going into each individual mark, and less consideration for what each mark actually accomplishes on an individual basis.
While your leaves exercise was admittedly not the best - not because of a lack of skill, but because you were distracted by a misalignment of goals (you were basically trying to accomplish something that was not what the exercise asked for) - the rest of your lesson work is actually really quite well done. Throughout the rest of this you do show more forethought in your markmaking, and a good sense of form and structure. As I've already spent a fair bit of time with the leaves, I'll address the rest more briefly:
Your branches are coming along well, and you're applying the steps from the instructions fairly well. Two things caught my eye, however: firstly, you need to be drawing through each ellipse two full times before lifting your pen (as you should for any ellipse you freehand in this course, as discussed back in Lesson 1). Secondly, make sure that when you draw those ellipses, that you're considering how their individual degree conveys that circular cross-section's orientation in space. As discussed in Lesson 1's ellipses video, if a branch were to be completely straight, the degree of those contour ellipses would still steadily get wider as we slide along the branch, moving away from the viewer. Now when the branch itself turns in space, that'll also impact the degree - but the baseline is still going to involve some shift in degree, getting wider as we move away from the viewer.
While your plant constructions are largely well done, there are some places where your linework gets more erratic - I'm assuming where you're trying to use line weight to more generally reinforce the silhouettes of your forms. Instead, try to use line weight in a more understated fashion - focus its use specifically where different forms overlap one another, limiting it to the localized area where the overlap actually occurs, as shown here. This will help you avoid having to trace back over long sections of existing lines (to avoid wobbly/hesitant lines as well as confident-but-inaccurate ones). Of course, be sure to continue using the ghosting method when executing those marks - but them being shorter will definitely help, while also making the drawing easier to understand.
I also noticed that in this drawing you decided to add form shading to the flower pot. Remember, as explained here in Lesson 2, form shading is not something we're going to be including in our drawings for this course. Often when students fall into focusing too much on "decoration" as discussed previously, they also are more prone to jumping into form shading, because it lines up with that desire to add more ink to their drawing.
Now, while the rest of your work is very solid, I am going to have to ask for one more page of leaves, to address the issues I've called out here. Be sure to look more closely at the various demonstrations throughout the lesson, specifically how each stage builds upon the one before it. I can also share some more with you:
Next Steps:
Please submit one more page of leaves.
Hello, thanks for taking the time to respond, I've made one more page of leaves, in some I have added detail, the rest I leave it in its basic structure.
This is vastly improved over your previous attempt, and is much more in line with what the exercise asks for. One thing to keep an eye on is to avoid including any kind of complexity in that initial silhouette structure. So for example, as shown here, leaf 10 has an additional bump in this early structure that should be left for a later phase of construction.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 4.
Thank you very much, I will continue with lesson 4
Hello, I was checking if I had what was needed to send my next work and I have noticed that I have 0 credits to send lesson 4, would you know if I spent any credits in the month of December? because I don't remember
The last submission I made was on November 25 for Lesson 3.
thanks.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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