Looking at your arrows, you're off to a pretty good start here, executing them with a great deal of confidence and fluidity. This carries over quite nicely into your leaves, where you're capturing both how they sit statically in the world, as well as how they move through the space they occupy. I'm also pleased to see that you're building up the more complex edge detail piece by piece, never trying to add too much all at once, and therefore always maintaining a strong relationship with the underlying structure and the solidity inherent in its relative simplicity.

One small suggestion I do have is to avoid drawing that additional edge detail with heavier line weight - it turns the drawing into two visually distinct parts, and can encourage students to try to replace more of the existing structure than they need to. Instead, use roughly the same amount of pressure to keep the drawing looking cohesive and consistent, and then for any constructions that feature overlapping forms, you can add line weight towards the end, focusing it in localized areas to help clarify how those forms overlap as shown here.

Now before I move off this exercise, I did want to call out an issue that comes up later in your set, when you start drawing maple leaves. Here, you pretty much throw what you've learned in this exercise completely to the wind, when you most definitely should not have. The principles of construction - of building things up steadily from simple structures - is at the core of this course as a whole, and as such you should never be jumping into drawing complex shapes without sufficient underlying structure to support them. In the informal demos section of the lesson, I actually have a demonstration showing how to apply the same principles of construction that we apply to simple leaves, to maple leaves. You may want to take a moment to compare that approach to your own. The skipping of steps is also addressed in these notes.

Moving onto your branches, I don't really think you spent as much time reading the instructions for this one as you should have, so there are a few issues:

• For some reason, you neglect to start your branches off with a central minor axis line about half the time, which negatively impacts the alignment of your ellipses. If a step is included in the instructions, there's no reason to leave it out.

• The instructions also explain that your segments should overlap quite a bit more than they are in your work. One segment should extend fully halfway to the next ellipse, and the next one should start at the previous ellipse, resulting in an overlap of roughly half the distance between ellipses. This helps achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from edge to edge.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, I think you're kind of following the same overall trend. You started off doing really well, following the instructions to the letter, and showing a great deal of respect for the principles of construction. As you progressed, however, your fastidious fell away, and you started taking shortcuts or throwing instructions aside, in favour of trying to aim for an end result, rather than considering the fact that it is the approach which matters. Every drawing we do in this course is an exercise, and so following the steps correctly is vastly more important than what you end up with on the page at the end.

Throughout your plant constructions, you're very inconsistent in how much of the techniques and principles you've been introduced to you're willing to apply, resulting in work that is all over the place. Rather than trying to critique what you've done here, I'm going to point out a few things that I want you to either adhere to or avoid moving forwards, and then I'm going to ask you to do this lesson again.

In all honesty, you're not that far off from doing the work well - you're just not investing your time in an effective manner. Rather than focusing on one drawing at a time, executing each and every element of it to the absolute best of your current ability (using the ghosting method, drawing through your ellipses, drawing each form in its entirety, working from simple to complex, etc.) you're working more haphazardly, focusing on covering the drawing with partially finished constructions. Some of them are moving in the right direction, while others skip several steps, jumping into complexity too soon instead of applying the principles covered in this lesson, and in the construction section of lesson 2.

Here's what I want you to keep in mind when doing this lesson again:

• Draw one thing at a time, and focus on every single mark. Use the ghosting method to ensure that you're considering what each mark's purpose is, and how you're going to achieve it best. If you have a plant with many leaves, each individual leaf's flow line is no less important for being part of a larger group. There are no deadlines or expectations on how long this stuff should take - you don't have to complete a single drawing, or a single page, in one sitting, or even one day. You can take as long, as many days as you need to complete just one drawing. What matters is that you execute the work to the best of your current ability.

• Give each individual drawing as much room on the page as it requires of you - rather than drawing everything small so you can pack in lots of drawings. If a single study takes up so much room that there isn't enough space for another, that's fine - as long as you've made good use of that space. So, when a drawing is done, assess whether there is enough room for another.

• Draw each form in its entirety. There will be circumstances where, say, a flower has so many petals that they overlap one another. Instead of allowing the petals to cut each other off, draw each and every one in its entirety. These are all just exercises in spatial reasoning, and drawing each form in its entirety will help you better understand how those forms relate to one another in 3D space.

• Avoid trees. To be fair, where you did attempt trees (especially this one) you handled them quite well - but as has been the trend in this critique, this didn't really address any of the main focuses of the course as a whole. Trees are a particularly complex case where we employ more texture (specifically creating cast shadow shapes that imply the presence of leaves on larger simpler masses), and that goes well outside of the scope of this lesson. There's nothing wrong with trying it out here as you did, but since you aren't otherwise consistently tackling the main concepts introduced in this lesson, taking a swing at trees is just pushing you further away from what you should be focusing on.

• Above all else, do not look at this lesson as "drawing plants". This lesson, and every lesson after it, is about constructional drawing, and using it as an exercise to develop your understanding of 3D space. For each lesson, we use a different subject as a lens through which we can look at the same problem.

As I've already mentioned, you're not far off from doing a great job. The issue comes down to staying focused on the task at hand. So, I want you to do this lesson over, and submit it anew (which will cost you another 2 credits, and will be subject to the 2 week wait between submissions). My hope is that by being particularly strict here, you will be pushed to adhere more closely to the instructions through the rest of the course, where it will be more and more important. At the end of the day, the goal is for you to learn as much as possible, even if some of the steps along the way are unpleasant.