Starting with your arrows, your linework here varies. Some of them are drawn with a greater degree of confidence (although there's still some hesitation, so make sure you're executing your marks using your whole arm, and employing the ghosting method). Others, however - especially as you get further down the page - end up much scratchier and more haphazard. It's really important that you focus on nothing more than simply taking your time with every single mark you make. Don't worry about how quickly you feel you're expected to complete any given exercise - there are no deadlines, no expected speeds. Even when it comes to your hatching lines, take the time to ensure they stretch across the ribbon from edge to edge, rather than having them float more haphazardly in the middle.

Your linework does improve overall when you get to your leaves, and you're doing a pretty decent job of capturing how they not only sit statically in 3D space, but also how they move through the space. When adding the smaller edge details though, spending a little more time in the planning/preparation phase of the ghosting method will help you avoid any little gaps or overshoots as you add those little bumps onto the edge of the previous phase of construction. Those gaps/overshoots end up creating a looser relationship between the constructional steps. The reason that matters is that our goal in working from simple to complex is to take the solidity of the simple structures from earlier on, and carry it through to the end even as we build up more complexity. As long as we maintain really tight relationships between those phases of construction - avoiding arbitrary gaps, making sure our lines don't zigzag back and forth across the existing edges, and so on, the end result will continue to feel solid and three dimensional.

Lastly, when it comes to texture, don't draw erratically or haphazardly. Texture, as discussed back in Lesson 2, is all about using specific, designed, cast shadow shapes to imply the presence of textural forms. We need to draw each little shadow shape we mean to add carefully and intentionally, thinking about how it creates the impression of some solid form that runs along the surface of our object.

Continuing onto your branches exercise, I don't think you read through the instructions here as closely as you could have. This exercise requires students to follow a very specific pattern with their marks - extending each segment from one ellipse, past the second, and halfway to the third, then starting the next segment at the second ellipse and repeating the pattern. While you've separated your branches into a few segments, across most of this you appear to have drawn a single continuous edge, somewhat defeating the purpose of the exercise.

Also, a couple things about the ellipses:

• Make sure you're drawing through each ellipse two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed in lesson 1.

• The degree of your contour ellipses helps convey the orientation of a given cross-sectional slice relative to the viewer, [as explained in the lesson 1 ellipses video](https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/5/video. Right now you appear to be keeping them roughly the same degree, which suggests that you're not thinking about how each one's degree helps convey the way in which the branch as a whole is moving through space.

Now, the issues I've called out thus far, from hesitant linework (not drawing using your whole arm, not employing the ghosting method), not employing the branches technique correctly, and so on definitely continue to show up in your plant constructions. When following along with the demonstrations you've done a fairly decent job outside of those issues - in terms of using the constructional principles and such, but when you go onto your own plant constructions, I feel that you allow all of the principles covered in the lesson to slip to the back of your mind, and you instead focus more on just drawing plants.

That, unfortunately, is incorrect. The drawings we do in this course only use specific topics as lenses through which to look at the same problem: every drawing is an exercise in spatial reasoning, an opportunity to construct simple forms and to define how they relate to one another in 3D space, ultimately building up towards some complex object. There are a number of ways in which you undermine this in how you approach your own drawings:

• In this one you aren't drawing each and every form in its entirety, choosing instead to cut them off where they're overlapped by another.

• In that same page, you're not constructing your branches around central minor axis lines to help align the individual ellipses to one another.

• Again, in that same page, you use the basic leaf construction principles for the lower leaves, but not for the flower petals above, instead jumping straight into drawing a more complex shape for each petal right from the get-go.

• You again skip the constructional steps when drawing the leaves on this rose, jumping straight into a jagged, erratic edge.

• In the same rose, you focus on trying to apply gradual form shading with your fineliner, though back in Lesson 2, it was stated that we would not be employing any form shading in our drawings for this course.

In general, I feel that you may have taken a bit of a wrong turn in how you chose to approach going through the material here. It is critical that you read through and follow the instructions to the letter, that you go through the videos and the written material. As such, I will be asking you to do this lesson over. When you've completed it once again, you will need to submit it as a new submission, which will cost you two additional credits.

These things happen - drawing can be a very engaging activity, and it's easy to sometimes get a little lost in what we're doing and forget the principles of the course for which the work is assigned. Remember, along with all the other points I've raised, that you are to continue practicing the exercises from the lessons you've already completed as part of a regular warmup routine (as mentioned in Lesson 0), to ensure that you keep sharpening those skills, and that you keep them fresh in your mind as you move forwards. I get the impression that you may not have held to that as closely as you should have.