Starting with your arrows, these are definitely flowing very smoothly and confidently through space. Just a few points to keep in mind:

  • Be sure to compress the spacing between the zigzagging sections as they move away from the viewer as shown here.

  • Don't leave your arrows, or any form open-ended. Closing things off is important when working in 3D space.

  • Make sure that when you do use hatching lines (which have very limited use in the rest of this course, but they are still helpful in more generic surfaces like these) that you have them stretch across the surface from edge to edge. Never have hatching lines stop suddenly and arbitrarily, as explained here.

Continuing onto your leaves, these are looking well done! You're carrying over the same confidence and fluidity to capture how they move through the space they occupy in the 3D world. You're also approaching the construction of more complex edge details well, building them on top of the existing structure rather than trying to outright replace the phase of construction preceding it.

When tackling more complex leaf structures though, I am noticing a small issue. Looking at this one, you started with a simple leaf shape, but then when constructing the smaller leaves inside of it, you should be having their flow lines extend all the way to the outer edge of your first, big shape. You can see this here. Note how there aren't any gaps between the ends of those smaller leaves, and the big shape encompassing them. Constructional drawing is all about maintaining specific relationships, where every stage of construction solves a specific problem, and every step after it adheres to that solution. Leaving gaps between things means that you're issuing a new answer to a question that has already been given a response. This in turn results in contradictions in your drawing that will undermine the illusion that the viewer is looking at something real and three dimensional.

Moving onto your branches, you're mostly doing a good job, though be sure to extend your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, and to start each segment at the previous ellipse as shown here. The overlap between them is important because it helps achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next.

Oh, also be sure to draw through each ellipse two full times before lifting your pen.

Continuing on, your plant constructions are for the most part coming along well, although there are a few points I want to draw attention to:

  • As mentioned before, don't leave gaps between constructional steps. One big case for this is how you tend to leave a gap between the end of your flow line, and the actual end of the petal. The flow line denotes the movement of the entire length of the petal, and therefore the petal should end at its tip.

  • Also make sure that whenever you draw a flow line, you are thinking about how it is meant to move through space confidently and fluidly. You did this well in the dedicated exercise, but tend to be much more stiff when drawing them as part of your actual drawings. Part of this is because your drawings are quite small, and I'll address this in a moment. Another thing that will help you remember to draw with more fluidity is to add a little arrow head on the end of the line, to help build the connection between the confident flow of your arrow exercise, and the movement we want to capture here.

  • So, as I mentioned, it's common for students to want to really pack their plants into a page. The goal there is laudable, but our first priority should be to ensure that we give each drawing as much room as it requires on the page. Drawing larger helps us both make better use of our brain's spatial reasoning skills (something that can be constricted with smaller spaces), and to make it easier to engage our whole arm when drawing, which also promotes fluidity to our lines. Once you've drawn your first drawing for a page, you can then assess whether there is more room available for another. If not, that's okay.

  • Make sure that you draw every single form you add to your construction in its entirety. Do not cut them off when they're overlapped by another. Basically a form doesn't cease to exist when we can't see it - drawing them in full helps us understand how they each exist in 3D space, and how they relate to one another within that space. Draw as though you have x-ray vision.

  • When drawing cylindrical structures like flower pots, be sure to construct them around a central minor axis line to help you align the ellipses. I am pleased to see that in such cases, you are drawing several ellipses (even including an inner one for the opening to define the "thickness" of that rim), although these ellipses are a bit sloppy. Be sure to draw them with your whole arm, and employ the ghosting method as you should for every mark drawn throughout this course.

So! I've given you a number of things to keep in mind, but overall I think you're making good progress. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.