To answer your question before we get started, you certainly are allowed to start the texture challenge, given that you've completed Lesson 2, which is the only prerequisite. Just remember not to do it all at once - spread it out, and do it in parallel amongst the other lessons.

Jumping right in with your arrows, you are mostly off to a good start - you're drawing these with a great deal of confidence, which helps to push the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. There are two things to pay attention to here however:

• Don't cut your arrows off where they overlap one another (I do mention this in the example section for the exercise). We draw everything in its entirety because that is how we can understand how the entire structure exists in 3D space. When we cut them off, we're only really understanding them from one point of view.

• Remember that the farther back in space you get, the more you need the gaps between the zigzagging sections to compress, as a result of perspective/foreshortening.

Getting back to that confidence, it carries over pretty well 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. You are generally handling the addition of edge detail decently, specifically in terms of building it up one stroke at a time. That said, you could stand to slow things down a bit, and put a bit more thought into each individual mark you put down. There's just a general sense that you're not taking as much time with each mark as you could, and so there are little bits of sloppiness that could be avoided (like marks over extending past the previous step's edge).

Continuing onto your branches, you're generally handling these well, although be sure to extend each edge segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, and try to overlap that last chunk of the previous segment directly, using it as a runway before shooting off to the next target, as shown here. This will help you learn more directly from your mistakes, as you'll be forced to contend with them, rather than drawing where that previous edge ought to have been.

Moving onto your plant constructions, there are a number of suggestions I have to offer:

• In the leaves of this plant, you're treating the stages of construction more like loose or general suggestions, to either follow or not follow as needed. Constructional drawing relies heavily on treating those earlier phases of constructions as though they're written in stone - each one makes a specific decision, and every subsequent step adheres to the decisions made before it. For example, here your initial leaf "footprint" defines how far out the leaf is going to reach, but you then went on to basically draw a whole leaf on top of it, extending beyond that footprint. As shown here, we do not redraw the entirety of the object from step to step - we merely draw the parts that change, allowing as much of the previous structure to stand for itself, as that is what allows the solidity of the simpler stages to carry forward as we build up more complexity. In that example, each "edge detail" mark is a cut into the physical structure of that earlier step, as though we were cutting into it with scissors.

• In cases like this one you tend to be very heavy with the line weight. Line weight should generally be kept very subtle, and should be added by going back over the existing line with the same pen, rather than a thicker one. Thicker pens and brush pens can be used, but only when filling in a shape that has already been designed/outlined - and specifically for cast shadow shapes, which are always cast from one form, onto another existing surface. The design of a given shadow shape should still be first established with your standard 0.5mm fineliner. Generally the most effective use of line weight, given the particular tool restrictions we employ in this course, is to limit its use to clarify how different forms overlap, in the localized areas where those overlaps occur, as shown here.

• I'm glad to see that you employed a minor axis when constructing the flower pot in this construction, although I have a few additional recommendations to that end. Firstly, be sure to draw each elliptical cross-section in its entirety (you only drew the base as a partial curve, but a full ellipse will help you better understand how the structure itself exists in 3D space). Also, be sure to draw through your ellipses two full times, as is required throughout this course. And lastly, be sure to add as many ellipses as are needed to flesh out the entirety of the structure - including at minimum, another one inset within the opening to establish the thickness of the rim, and another to establish the level of the soil so the plant's stem has something to intersect with, giving it a greater sense of grounding.

• A quick point of clarification about the potato plant demo - in that demonstration, we fill in certain areas between the leaves with solid black. It may appear arbitrary at first, but these filled areas are just cast shadows, where the foliage becomes dense enough to cover all of the dirt that is visible between the leaves. When you applied it in yours, it ended up going quite a bit beyond that, and ostensibly light would penetrate through. I'm merely mentioning this because I don't want you to get the impression that you should be adding random black shapes behind your plants (as you did here where, since the plant is upright and seen from the side, there would be no surface to receive those cast shadow shapes).

As a whole, you're applying many of the techniques correctly, but you need to give yourself more time for the execution of each form, each shape, and each mark, making full use of the ghosting method. I will be marking this lesson as complete, but you definitely need to allocate more time than you may expect going forward. I would also advise you against doing the work in a sketchbook. I talk about the reasons why in this video from Lesson 0.