Starting with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job here of drawing them with a good deal of confidence, which helps you to establish the fluidity with which they move through space. This carries over into your leaves pretty well, helping you to capture not only how they sit statically in the world, but also how they move through the space they occupy - however I do feel that you're riding that edge between confident markmaking and a tendency to be a little sloppy.

Remember that every mark we draw must be the result of the ghosting method. The ghosting method is less about putting down points and all that - rather, it's about breaking the process into three distinct phases, ensuring we plan (think about what we want to achieve with a mark, what its role is meant to be), then preparing to execute it to those specifications (repeatedly ghosting through the motion), and finally executing with confidence. That planning phase is quite important, though it's also the one students are most likely to ignore as they focus on speed and instinct.

While you weren't really taking all those notes at this point, it is one of the reasons I'd agree with you on notes not being super beneficial in this context. Reason being, it functions as a sort of "educational theatre" - that is, something we do to make ourselves feel like we're doing more, and therefore getting more out of the activity. It does however tend to become somewhat distracting, and can help us lean away from investing our time appropriately to simply going through those three steps for every mark we make.

So, to that point, as you work through the leaves, you do generally go through the steps pretty well, albeit sloppily. For example, the edge detail on number 4 is rather rushed and erratic (rather than having every individual little mark executed to the best of your ability), and in number 3, you're approaching the complex leaf structure with all the right steps, you just need to take more care in ensuring that every sub-leaf structure's flow line actually ends right at the edge of the larger leaf shape, rather than overshooting it, so as to maintain a tighter, more specific relationship between the phases of construction.

You mentioned in that other point that you skipped adding edge detail. You're correct that only the 4th step is optional, though from what I can see, you didn't skip over step 3 (or 4 for that matter). Perhaps you're talking about the leaves in your actual plant drawings, in which case leaving out edge detail isn't that big of a deal.

Continuing onto your branches, while you're overall following the steps correctly, I'm again noticing some sloppiness that is hindering the exercise. If you take a look at this section, I'm noticing a couple issues with how your segments are planned out and executed, and the overlaps that result:

• Along the upper edge, you're extending the previous segment halfway to the next ellipse (good), but the next one starts after the previous ellipse, minimizing that overlap.

• Along the lower edge, you're not extending your segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, resulting in less overlap.

That overlap, as shown here, is important to achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from segment to segment. This of course means taking the time to plan out each stroke so it starts and ends at the intended point (rather than jumping right into execution and getting "close enough"). It's not that perfection is the only acceptable thing - just that if you can do better by taking more time, then it is your responsibility to do so as far as the course asking students to do the best of their current ability.

There are a couple other things worth mentioning:

• Right now it looks like your ellipses are maintaining roughly the same degree, or that their degree is somewhat arbitrary. Remember that as explained in Lesson 1's ellipse video, as we slide along the length of a cylindrical structure moving away from the viewer, the degree of the ellipses will get wider.

• You also appear to not be drawing through each of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, which as discussed in Lesson 1 is a requirement for all the ellipses we freehand throughout this course.

Now, all that said, as we get into your plant constructions (where you actually start piling on those notes), it seems to me like you're actually demonstrating more overall patience. Sure, this kind of spits in the face of my hypothesis of notes being distracting, but it is what it is. While it's certainly not perfect, you're showing a bit more care in the execution of your lines, resulting in more precision and fewer gaps in the silhouettes of your forms, especially as you progress thorugh the set.

Along with taking more care in the execution of each mark, you tend to maintain tighter, more specific relationships between those different phases of construction. There are a few places where you still end up with little arbitrary gaps, like here (those flow lines should stop right at the larger leaf shape's outer edge, and the smaller leaf shapes should end at their respective flow lines), but as a whole you definitely improve a great deal over those earlier exercises.

I do still urge you to continue to focus on giving every phase of the ghosting method its due time, but as a whole I'm pretty pleased. I was definitely leaning towards assigning revisions for the leaves and branches, but I feel the plant construction drawings render that a little moot. Just refrain from rushing in the future.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.