I'm sure you understand this on a logical level (though perhaps not emotionally, which is the one that really matters), but the mechanics of executing a mark with a fineliner is no different than doing so with a pencil. Your arm moves in the same fashion, the tool makes contact with the page, and a mark is made. Of course, what interferes on the part of the fineliner is the psychological aspect - we know we're committing to a permanent stroke, we know that mark is going to be fully dark and unavoidable. It causes us to fear the process of mark making, and this is what causes us to second-guess ourselves.

We know that we can accomplish the task, but the specific nature of the tool is what hinders us. It is a matter of coming to terms with the fact that there is no real difference between what goes into making a mark with one tool or the other. That the difficulty involved, and the frustration is something that we bring to the table ourselves.

On another note, just as a formality, I did want to confirm that you are indeed doing warmups of 10-15 minutes, consisting of 2 to 3 exercises chosen from the lessons you've already completed? Those earlier exercises are the bedrock of these mark-making mechanics, and all students need to continue refining and sharpening those skills as they move forward, both to continue improving and to maintain what they've already developed.

Alrighty, so I'm actually glad you included the arrows here, because they allow us to achieve something of a useful comparison. If you look at the arrows, they're drawn pretty confidently, and they capture a great sense of flow. Your lines cover a pretty significant distance, and still you're able to maintain a consistent width throughout the arrows - there's no awkward pinching or wobbling, both edges mirror each other nicely on all of these.

Moving over to your branches, things change quite a bit - and I don't think it has anything to do with technical skill. Your lines here go off their intended trajectory very quickly. While it is normal to see some visible 'tails' where those lines veer off their paths, here I think the reason this happens is pretty straight forward:

When drawing your arrows, you're doing so from your shoulder. When drawing your branches, you're drawing from your wrist.

One thing that can help quite a bit is drawing the branches to be larger, forcing you to contend with longer lines between your ellipses, and avoiding the sort of cramped situation you're encountering here.

Moving onto your mushroom constructions, I think what you're aiming to accomplish here is in many ways moving in the right direction, but one specific aspect of the drawings definitely has you struggling - the ellipses. They're frequently quite loose, especially as they get larger. This again is a common side-effect of drawing more from your wrist or elbow. As the ellipses come out unwound, it's much more difficult to achieve an illusion of solidity in the resulting forms.

The relatively small scale of your drawings here also contributes to this - drawing smaller causes us to cramp up, and makes it harder to engage our spatial reasoning skills while also impeding the use of our full arm.

You did mention before that you were stuck in bed, and I definitely understand that this can make drawing from your shoulder harder. It's still absolutely possible, but this kind of hindrance can make learning that skill and becoming comfortable with it that much more challenging.

One last point about the mushrooms - the details themselves are usually rushed, and don't really follow the principles covered back in lesson 2 (relying on cast shadow shapes rather than outlines, like where you outlined the little growths on the cap of the fly agaric mushroom). I think for now it is a good idea to leave all kinds of detail and texture aside for now - having you tackle many, many different things all at once is only going to compound things. Better that we get you comfortable with the primary focus of this course, rather than fussing with anything beyond.

Lastly, your leafy plants are fairly well done. I can see you putting a lot more effort into the construction of your flower pots, and I can even see some improvement in the use of your branches, which is definitely good to see.

I did ask for one page of flower drawings, which doesn't seem to be in this album. Since you included some reference images of flowers, I suspect you did complete the page, so it must have gotten lost in the shuffle.

So, as described above, there are a few key issues that I'm seeing in your work that we should try to address:

• You are absolutely capable of drawing longer, flowing lines from your shoulder as you demonstrated with your arrows. You need to be using your arm the same way even when drawing shorter lines. Counter-intuitively, the best way to do this is actually just to further increase your general comfort with drawing from your shoulder, which we can do by having you draw things bigger. Don't draw so cramped on the page, take full advantage of all the space that is available to you

• You're definitely struggling with your ellipses. This can at least in part be due to drawing from your elbow or wrist, but in general ellipses can be challenging. We'll need to look more closely at this.

• Leave texture/detail aside. Focus entirely on drawing the major forms of your constructions, and on making each form feel solid and complete.

I'll assign a few extra pages below, but I think after this last round of revisions I'm going to clear you to move onto the insects regardless of how they come out. Moving onto the insects will help give you a fresh angle from which to attack these problems.