Starting with your arrows, good stuff - you're doing a great job of drawing these marks with a great deal of confidence, which goes a long way towards conveying the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. This carries over quite 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 from moment to moment. From what I can see, you're handling the addition of edge detail and the more complex leaf structures well, although the extent to which you've pushed the decoration on these leaves does make it somewhat harder to tell. This is actually an issue that I will be talking about a little further when we get to your plant constructions, as you appear to be misunderstanding the distinction between general decoration, and the textural concepts covered in Lesson 2.

Continuing onto your branches, generally you're doing well here, although it is important that you ensure that each segment extends fully halfway to the next ellipse - yours tend to fall a little short at times, and I'm noticing a few spots where you also don't quite start back at the previous ellipse. Just be sure to review these instructions closely.

Moving onto your plant constructions, overall you're doing really well in regards to the core construction. It's clear that your overall grasp of 3D space is progressing well. I do have a few points to call out however:

• I noticed that in some cases you're more prone to zigzagging edge detail. Remember - each element of edge detail should be executed using a single mark, coming off and returning to the existing structure before stopping. Don't attempt to capture multiple pieces of edge detail with a single zigzagging stroke, as we see in your californian poppy.

• Always maintain tight, specific relationships between the stages of construction. So for example, if you end up using an ellipse as we do in the hibiscus demo to define the boundary to which the petals will extend, be sure to have your flow lines then extend right to the perimeter of that ellipse, rather than overshooting it or falling short, so as to respect and adhere to this prior decision made earlier in the process (as opposed to contradicting and undermining it). Similarly, each petal would then end where its flow line does, though you're generally good with this part.

As to the matter of decoration vs. texture, right now you appear to be primarily focused on doing what you can to take your completed constructions and make them as visually pleasing as you can. This unfortunately leads to a fairly unreliable goal, for the purposes of an exercise, since there's no clear point at which one has added enough decoration. It can also lead to students looking to directly transfer elements from their reference to their drawing based on observation alone, and not based on the kind of understanding of those textural forms as they exist in 3D space that is explained here. It also leads to using a lot of form shading, which as mentioned here does not play a role in our drawings for this course.

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.

With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Just be sure to keep these points in mind going forward.