Hello HeyItsAMarioParty, thank you for getting back to me with your revisions.

The linework for your leaves is looking smooth which helps communicate their fluidity and sense of energy, it's good that you're not only trying to capture how these structures sit statically within space, but also how they move across it from moment to moment. Your edge detail is also looking quite well made.

Your addition of texture is coming along quite explicitly made as you make use of large areas of black in your work which aren't actually cast shadows, make sure to carefully analyze your reference picture and find any grooves or any veins raised from the surface of the leave in order to identify any cast shadows present and only then translate them to your construction.

When it comes to your branches you are still not always drawing through your ellipses twice which is a mistake. Make sure to also pay close attention to the ellipse degree shift in your branches, while you seem aware of if your degrees are often too close together or there's barely a noticeable difference which flattens yohr structures.

Onto your plant constructions they're coming along quite nicely made. You're usually making use of the construction methods and techniques introduced in this Lesson which helps you create the illusion of tridimensionality in your work.

But do keep in mind that because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions.

• For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

While this is something that you do generally respect we can see in here spots where you cut back into the ellipse you've laid down. The way you've approached this structure is also very non-specific and does not communicate any clear sense of tridimensionality because there are no clear plane shifts.

You can find here more information that talks about how to make use of organic forms to construct plants that aren't simple branches with leaf structures attached to them, and you can see here how you can construct on top of your preexisting structures with new organic forms.

Your addition of texture is starting to head in the right direction but it still needs work as there are points where you start to outline your textures and think of them quite explicitly, so don't forget to revisit the feedback in my first critique and continue to practice your texture skills.

In general your work is good, you're on the path to understanding the purpose of these techniques and exercises and you're making good use of them in your work, if you iron out on a couple of issues you'll be on the path towards drawing even more solid and believable tridimensional structures.

I'm going to be marking this lesson as complete. Good luck in Lesson 4.

Sorry for the wait - Mushroom's temporarily away, but I figured I'd step in and answer your questions.

In regards to your first question, when drawing along with the demos, it is best to follow it directly, rather than trying to interpret it more loosely against a different reference image, so that you can put yourself in our shoes so to speak, and better understand why we're making the choices we are in those demos. That said, students aren't required to draw along with the demos (we do recommend it of course), so it's fine to do studies of different photos of the same plants, I just wouldn't recommend mixing the two as you did here. It's not inherently wrong or against the instructions, but it does reduce how effectively you'd be internalizing the demonstration compared to following with the demo and its reference, and then applying what you learned to the constructions based on entirely different reference images.

For your second question, I'll be completely honest - I totally forgot that demo was there. This course has evolved over the years in regards to how we tackle texture, starting from where Peter Han's Dynamic Sketching course really just regarded it was a visual pattern to create an effect, and gradually shifting more and more to thinking of texture as just a different manifestation of the 3D spatial relationships we deal with through the rest of the course.

As we work through our overhaul (Lesson 2 is what we're looking at right now, trying to figure out how to apply all that we've learned from providing students official critique, and all that we've conveyed through that feedback), this is an issue that is steadily being resolved - but right now it does mean that some of these demos are less relevant. For right now, the texture analysis demo material, which focuses heavily on cast shadows, is the most "current" and "accurate" explanation of texture we've got, where it's all about focusing on the concrete relationships between the textural forms and the surfaces around them, which are defined by the shapes of our shadows.

In step 3 of the "fun with texture" demo, that's not really what we're doing - rather, it's more that it's leaning into shading, which based on our current approach is not correct. So, I'm going to go ahead and remove that demo to avoid confusion.

Instead, I'll give you these:

First, as shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. This gives us the logical grounds to say that despite two forms being identical, they don't have to cast identical shadows - and therefore we can control where we want shadows to be longer or shorter, without changing the nature of the texture being conveyed.

Next, building off that premise, this diagram refers to the Lesson 2 texture analysis exercise and explains how it is we think when we tackle it:

• First in the traceover of the reference image, we're identifying the kinds of forms that are present and how they vary/how they're similar.

• Then in the first rectangle labeled "the forms we're transferring" this is more of an idea of how we would, in our heads, think about arranging those textural forms on our surface based on what we saw in the reference.

• Next in the rectangle labeled "how we're thinking about the cast shadows" are the actual lines we'd be drawing to design those cast shadow shapes, based on our understanding of the relationship between each textural form and the surfaces around it. The forms from the previous step are faded out here, because again - they weren't drawn. This is definitely the most challenging part, because working implicitly requires us to think about multiple forms simultaneously without drawing them - though not all at once, more a small handful including the one whose shadow you wish to design, and those whose surfaces that shadow might touch.

• And finally, we'd fill in those shadow shapes.

At its core, this is how we can think about texture in any of our constructions - it's about acknowledging texture as being made up of small forms, which cast shadows which can join together to create larger and more complex shadow shapes, or which can be so small as to not be seen.

That gives us tools that we can use to convey the nature of the surface's texture to the viewer. Keep in mind it's never about reproducing our reference perfectly - it's about having something concrete that we wish to convey or communicate to the viewer, and then using the reference and all of the forms it displays as tools to help convey that.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. Don't worry if texture doesn't really sink in for a good while - we'll have updated the texture section of Lesson 2 (mostly to convey what I said above, but also to present it with exercises further help in applying those concepts) well before you're finished with the course as a whole, and ultimately it still is going to depend heavily on the overall spatial reasoning skills the rest of the course material focuses on. In other words, don't let it hold you up too much right now, as it's expected to still be rather perplexing at this stage.

When you do have your revisions ready, be sure to respond to the original critique, so Mushroom gets notified.