I largely agree with your assessment there - while things are quite rough throughout the set, you're clearly showing that you're grasping the core principles of constructions. I do however really need to stress that you may be jumping into making marks a little too quickly, without enough forethought and planning. Remember that the majority of your time in these drawings goes into observing your reference, and determining the nature and intended purpose of every mark you intend to draw. Holding yourself back a little more and assessing the situation can really help you to achieve results that line up better to where your skills actually are.

Anyway, starting with your arrows, you're definitely capturing an excellent sense of movement and fluidity with these. They move with an excellent sense of force, though it would be nice to see a greater variety, with some arrows that are following a more languid, leisurely path (with bigger zigzags - all of yours seem to quickly funnel down into these really tight back-and-forths).

I definitely feel that the fluidity and confidence of your arrows doesn't quite carry over as well into your leaves, despite the main concept being largely the same. Since leaves are so thin and light, they very easily follow the force of wind as it pushes them along, effectively making them representations of motion and movement. You're getting there, but you're not quite showing the kind of motion here that we see in your arrows. One thing I often do to help with this is to add a little arrow head at the end of my flow line to remind myself how important it is that the flow line establish just how that leaf moves through the space it occupies.

You have overall done a good job of building up edge detail, using constructional principles to build upon the previous phase of construction rather than zigzagging loosely around it or trying to replace it entirely. When it comes to texture though, you're definitely getting a little too caught up in drawing arbitrary marks and shapes, and not enough on the principles from Lesson 2. That is, the idea that texture is made up of shadow shapes, each cast by textural forms that sit along the surface of an object, upon its neighbouring surfaces. It definitely appears to me here that you got caught up in the idea of just arbitrarily decorating your leaves, which resulted in a lot more random patterns rather than thinking about the actual forms present there.

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.

One last point about this before we move on - since we're focusing on the idea of cast shadows, it really is best to reserve all areas of filled, solid black, for cast shadows only. If you see something that is actually black in the local colour of its surface, ignore it. Treat the entire object like it's covered in the same flat white. Similarly, ignore any patterns, as these are also just flat variations in colour. Focus only on the kinds of things we can touch and feel with our hands.

Moving onto your branches, you're approaching this decently for the most part, though there are two key things to keep in mind:

• Always extend your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, as shown here. There are a few places where you don't quite extend far enough, resulting in a limited overlap between segments. That overlap is critical to help us transition smoothly and seamlessly from one segment to the next.

• Similarly to the first point, if your previous segment goes off the intended path, you should still be using the last chunk of that segment as a runway for your next one. Don't draw the next one where the previous one ought to have been. This will force you to take that mistake into account, and will let you learn from it.

Moving onto your plant constructions, as I said before, you definitely show considerable growth in your understanding of the material, but there is certainly some impatience there as well, where you may be rushing forwards too eagerly, without thinking through each and every mark. It's not uncommon for students to be thinking two or three steps ahead, rather than one what they're doing at that moment. This can result in sloppiness.

I did notice that in your drawing of holly, you ended up breaking away from the leaf construction process from the exercise. Instead of building things up on the previous phase of construction, you largely ignored the simpler leaf edges and instead redrew it in its entirety. This is very similar to something I saw from another student, so I'll show you the example I drew for them.

Aside from that, you are doing pretty well. I do however want to see you slow down a little, and just spend a bit more time thinking through your actions before executing them. As such, I'll assign a couple additional pages below.