Alrighty! So to start with, your arrows are looking great. You're capturing an excellent sense of fluidity while also doing a great job of capturing the depth of the scene, applying perspective to both the positive space (the width of the arrows) and the negative space (the distances between the zigzagging sections).
You do a pretty good job of carrying this confidence and flow into your leaves, which is great to see. Many students tend to get too caught up in the fact that they're finally drawing something real and concrete, and so they'll focus on drawing the leaves as though they're 100 pound, solid, unmoving objects. They capture the leaf as though it stays frozen like this for all time before and after the given drawing. What you're doing instead suggests actual motion - you capture how the leaves move through space. You capture how the leaf sits in space during this specific moment, with a suggestion of where it might be in the previous and next moments.
Additionally, I'm very pleased with how you're handling the actual varying edge detail - where you adhere closely to the structure defined in the previous phase of construction. This is something you actually fail to do later on, and you'll see me bring it up in a little bit.
Moving onto your branches, all in all I think you're aiming in the right direction and making good headway here. Your linework is confident, and while your overall control/accuracy could be improved, you're still managing to maintain smooth, consistent trajectories which is the first priority. One suggestion though - I'm noticing that you're not necessarily extending your line segments to halfway towards the next ellipse, and sometimes failing to start the next segment at the previous ellipse. This tells me that you may be rushing through the process, instead of paying more attention to exactly what you're doing. Keep drawing confidently, but slow down in the planning/preparation process and think about what you need from each and every mark you put down on the page.
Onto your plant constructions - you're mostly doing a great job with these, with a few key problems. Your general grasp of how these are all made from individual forms being combined in space is quite solid, but I think there are definitely places where you have a tendency to rush and forget key parts of the process. In cases where the subject matter involves a lot of different forms, you're more likely to spend less time on each individual component, or each individual line, hoping that your instincts will take over. What we're doing now - drawing everything with clear planning and intent - helps ultimately develop those instincts, but if you attempt to rely on them anywhere within Drawabox, you won't get much out of them.
This stands out most on this page, where towards the upper left you've basically just put a bunch of lines down hoping they'd come out right, but actually exhibiting very little actual conscious planning. You also stop drawing through each individual form here - that is, drawing each form in its entirety so we can better understand how they all exist in space, and how they relate to one another within it. An example of this done correctly is your potato plant, where you've actually taken the time to build out each individual leaf on its own, and to draw each individual mark as best as you can. The left side of this page is also another example of you tackling something complex very well, taking your time rather than hoping your instincts will carry you through.
To the left side of this page, there are just a couple of issues I want to mention quickly:
When laying down that ellipse, it essentially defines your intention for how far out the petals will actually go from the center. It is a decision you've made, and the mark on the page asserts this. To then choose to change this decision later on in the drawing adds contradictions to your drawing, which undermines your viewer's suspension of disbelief. Once you've made a decision, you need to stick to it - even if that means that your drawing won't look exactly like the reference.
While you're generally adhering pretty closely to the simpler leaf forms laid out in the earlier stage of construction, you do have a tendency to zigzag your lines (creating a single continuous line that goes back and forth, rather than drawing them in individual, separate segments. This breaks one of the rules of markmaking from lesson 1. You do this to a much greater extent on this page, where you're now allowing yourself to treat the previous phase of construction as more of a loose suggestion. Always stick to the scaffolding/structure you've already put up.
Looking back at the potato plant, I noticed that you were putting down a lot of really thick black chunks along the edges of some of your leaves. Drawing the shadows cast by a form to help separate that form from its surroundings is a great strategy, but in many of the cases here, this is not what you're doing. For one thing, these "shadows" appear to stick to the leaves that cast them, rather than falling on an underlying surface. Secondly, they appear to fall on both sides of a form, suggesting an inconsistent light source.
What I believe is more likely is that this is your attempt to mask mistakes, where you're merging lines together with a big blotch of black. If you make a mistake, leave it alone. If you get into the habit of trying to hide or correct them, you'll merely be piling ink onto the problematic area and drawing the viewer's attention to it. In doing so, you'll lose control over how you want the viewer's eye to be guided across the page, instead allowing it to be determined by where you mess up.
The last thing I want to mention is that when tackling texture (like on this cactus, both for the nodes along its surface and the pebbles at its base), you rely very heavily on putting the outlines down for each textural form. Back in lesson 2, we discuss the importance of using cast shadows to imply the presence of those details, rather than creating such explicit boundaries between areas of texture. I recently rewrote the texture section of lesson 2, along with new (short) videos, and I strongly encourage you watch them. Specifically, the video on implicit vs explicit explains the issue here in detail.
All in all, I think you're doing fairly decently, and while there are a number of things I want you to keep an eye on, you'll be able to do them in the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 4.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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