Starting with your arrows, good work - you're focusing on achieving confident marks that help to really push the sense of fluidity with which they move through the world. This carries over quite well into your leaves, where you're able to capture both how they sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy - although the manner in which you've approached building up that edge detail, doing so with darker lines and frequently leaving gaps between the phases of construction, does diminish this somewhat.

Right now it appears that you're treating the earlier phases of construction as something to be entirely replaced by later phases, to make as little of a mark on the page so as not to mar the details you lay in at the end. We can see this by the tendency to draw them more faintly, and steadily increase the thickness of your linework as you progress.

Remember - what we're doing here is not putting down a rough sketch to use as a guide. We are effectively introducing a structure to the world, as though it were a simple leaf shape cut out of a piece of paper, and as we add edge detail to it or build up its structure, we are actively making physical changes to that existing form. If we want to add spikes to its edge, we're physically adding more pieces of paper to it. If we want to create a wobbly edge, we are physically drooping and lifting sections of its perimeter in 3D space. And if we want to cut into its silhouette, then the lines we're drawing represent the paths a pair of scissors would follow to cut it out, as shown here.

You are breaking away from this quite a bit with the tendency to have a single mark zigzag back and forth (which breaks the third principle of markmaking from Lesson 1, and is specifically addressed as something to avoid here in these notes).

As a side note, I also wanted to mention that with this leaf establishing little flow lines for each of the major protrusions suggests that your intent was to tackle them as a complex leaf structure - but that would require you to draw each such "arm" with its own complete leaf structure, around each given flow line, and then merge them together as shown here.

As to the approach to detail, that is something I'll address towards the end of the critique, as it is also relevant to how you've approached many of your later plant constructions.

Continuing onto your branches, your work here is generally coming along decently, though I have a couple of things to draw to your attention:

• Be sure to extend your edge segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, as demonstrated here.

• I noticed some places where you appeared to go back over your lines, leading to some rather arbitrary thickness - remember that line weight is a specific tool with its own purpose as discussed here and in the section below it here. It is not meant to be used to correct mistakes. In this course, you will make mistakes, and it's best to simply leave them on their own, rather than trying to hide them.

Remember above all else that every single drawing we do throughout this course is an exercise - the purpose is not to make pretty renderings, and having that as a secondary goal can undermine or obfuscate what we're really supposed to be achieving here.

Continuing onto your plant constructions, as far as the actual use of construction goes (so focusing on the no-detail ones), you're honestly doing great. I have just a couple points to call out:

• When constructing your cylindrical flower pots, or any kind of cylindrical structure, be sure to do so around a central minor axis line to help in aligning your various ellipses to one another. Very glad to see you including ellipses inset within the openings of your pots though, where you're establishing the thickness of the rim instead of leaving them paper-thin.

• Normally you're better at this, so this barely bears mentioning, but remember that every mark we put down is a decision being made. So with this one, the ellipse you started with was meant to actually define the boundaries of the volume in which the structure would exist within. As such, ensure that the forms you build within it are restricted to being inside of that volume, rather than overshooting beyond it.

Now, moving onto the detailed side of things, unfortunately you've ended up pursuing a very different goal - one of decoration, which speaks more to doing whatever you can to make the resulting drawing more visually pleasing - rather than the textural principles introduced in Lesson 2, which use a process you'll find summarized here.

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 (which itself will motivate you to lean into form shading, which as discussed here is not something we include in our drawings for this course) 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.

I'll still be marking this lesson as complete, as by and large you've done quite well - just be sure to keep these points in mind going forward. And of course, be sure to address the issues I called out in your leaves exercise as you continue to practice that exercise in your warmups.