Starting with your arrows, you're doing an excellent job of drawing these with a great deal of confidence. This helps to convey the fluidity with which these structures move through the world.

This carries over very nicely into your leaves, where you're doing a great job of not only capturing how each leaf sits statically in 3D space, but also how they actually move through the space they occupy, despite capturing only a single moment in time. Your basic leaf structures are coming along great - although I did notice that you neglected to add any edge detail at all, so that was definitely a missed opportunity to explore building up the construction further.

Looking further into the leaves in your constructions, I did notice one prominent issue - you tend to zigzag y our edge detail back and forth, effectively replacing the existing edge from the previous stage of construction, rather than building upon it. We can see this most prominently on the left-side drawing on this page. Also, these notes go into this issue in more detail.

Keep in mind that construction is about building one stage upon the previous one. Each one merely introduces aspects that have changed - we are not outright replacing or entirely redrawing the structure from one step to the next. Nor are the earlier steps just loose sketches for us to then clean up and redraw - wherever that earlier step can stand for itself, it should be allowed to. Doing so allows the solidity achieved in the simpler stages to carry forward as we build up more complexity.

Continuing onto your branches, unfortunately it seems you haven't followed the instructions for this one as closely as you should. Each segment is to start at one ellipse, continue past the second, and stop halfway to the third, with the next segment then starting at the second ellipse and continuing the pattern. This allows for a healthy overlap between them, which in turn helps us achieve a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next, as shown here in the instructions.

Moving onto your plant constructions, despite the issues I mentioned above being present here, there's a lot you're doing very well. Your simpler constructions are generally quite well done. I do have some notes to share on how you approach the detail stage of your later constructions, but before that, I'm going to quickly call out a few issues I did notice:

• On this page, I noticed that when you were drawing those more complex leaf structures, you ended up skipping ahead way too far. This demonstration shows how we can build up those leaves in stages, holding to the idea of only ever adding as much complexity as can be supported by the existing structure, and otherwise adding intermediary steps in between to build up more scaffolding where it's necessary. As for skipping steps, these notes expand on this.

• As construction is all about maintaining tight, specific relationships between the different steps, it's important to make sure that when you draw a flow line for a leaf or petal, that the given leaf/petal actually ends at the tip of the flow line, leaving no arbitrary gaps between them. I noticed that you were adding a little arrow head to the tip of your flow lines (which is great, I do this myself as it can help remind us to draw it confidently, and that it represents motions), but you tend to place it a little ahead of the end of the line. Be sure to place it right at the tip as well, so you don't end up with any sloppy gaps.

• I did notice that in some cases, you'd fill in the negative space between a cluster of leaves with solid black. We can see this in this page and on the top left of this one. Now I suspect you may have done this because you perhaps misinterpreted something from the potato plant demo. It appears there that in the middle we're filling the negative space in with black, but in fact we're capturing the shadows that the dense foliage would cast upon the dirt below - something we can only do there because there's a surface to receive the shadow, and because the foliage is dense enough to cover it completely. Without the context of the shadows being cast by the other leaves, we can definitely interpret this as just being an arbitrary choice of artistic license (something you won't see in this course)

• For the really tiny branches on this page, you ended up representing them as lines, rather than forms. That's something you should avoid in this course - we definitely want to be capturing everything as proper forms, with complete silhouettes, even if they're very small - although this does become challenging, so don't worry if it gets tricky.

Now, on the topic of detail, when you hit that stage, with all your construction done, it seems to me that your focus shifts largely to one of decoration. That is, doing what you can to make your drawings feel more interesting, more complex, and just generally more visually pleasing. The thing is though, decoration is not really a clearly defined goal. There's no specific point at which we've added enough decoration, and so we do not know when to stop. As a result, we end up looking for more and more reasons/excuses to add more ink.

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, 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.

In truth, the way you use your cast shadows in the earlier constructions works out really well - just a touch of texture (again, focusing on cast shadows for the smaller textural forms you want to convey) will be plenty, just don't go overboard. Always ask yourself what the goal you're working towards is, and what you're trying to get across to the viewer. We're not actually reproducing our reference image - we're simply conveying what it depicts.

I'm going to assign some minimal revisions below, mainly due to the leaf/branch issues. I'm confident that your next attempt will be more than good enough to continue forwards.