Starting with your arrows, your work here is generally looking good - although while I can see you putting some consideration into the application of foreshortening to the negative space, you definitely should be pushing it farther and exaggerating how much the gaps between the zigzagging sections tighten up the further back we look. I would also advise allowing for those zigzags to overlap one another, as right now it seems like you might be subconsciously avoiding it.

That said, the main focus of this exercise - which is on establishing a sense of confidence and fluidity - is coming along well, and it carries over nicely into your leaves as well, helping you to capture not only how they sit statically in 3D space but also how they move through the space they occupy.

There are a few points I want to call out however, covering a few different areas:

• Firstly, a quick reminder that the use of filled areas of solid black is not arbitrary or decorative. As discussed in Lesson 2, it's always to represent cast shadows, which themselves require us to consider the relationship between the specific form casting the shadow, and the surface receiving it, and conveying that relationship through the particular design of the shadow shape. You can read more about this in these notes, which also touch upon why it's not enough to simply transfer those details directly from the reference via observation, but instead necessary to also understand how the things depicted actually exist in three dimensions.

• It appears that as you add edge detail, you may be prone to adding many little protrusions with a single repeating stroke. I explain why you should stick to a single stroke per element of edge detail in these notes - although you should also note that zigzagging in this manner specifically breaks this principle of markmaking from Lesson 1.

• To a similar point to the previous one, there are definitely cases where you do not really hold to the principle of construction being one of building upon the previous structure. Rather, you tend to be more loose, treating the previous stage as more of a suggestion rather than something concrete. We see this in how the spiky structure of this leaf crosses the previous edge rather than attaching to it more solidly. We see the same in this one, although this would be a good case to approach it as a more complex leaf structure, as demonstrated here.

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.

Continuing onto your branches, overall you're doing well, but there are some notable smaller points that you need to keep in mind:

• Firstly, the manner in which we lay out our edge segments in this exercise is quite specific. Each segment starts from one ellipse, continues past the second, and stops halfway to the third, with the next segment starting a little ways back at the previous ellipse and repeating the pattern from there. You certainly do this to a point, but not always consistently - many of your edge segments stop too early, so you're going to want to make a point to extend them fully halfway. I only saw one or two cases where the next segment started too far down however, so that one at least appears to have been an outlier.

• Secondly, don't forget to draw through all of your freehanded ellipses two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1.

Moving onto your plant constructions, I'll touch on a few quick points one at a time.

• This is really more of an extension of the point I made in your leaves exercise, regarding filled areas of solid black. You have a tendency to use these more broadly, rather than towards a particular purpose. How you use these tools is up to you in general, but in this course reserve them for cast shadows only. Additionally, keep in mind that line weight, while seemingly similar to cast shadows, are distinct with their own rules (specifically they are generally going to be subtle rather than overt and obvious, and they do cling to the silhouette of a given form while cast shadows cannot and must fall upon another surface). Sometimes the line between them can get a little blurred, so remembering that they are in fact distinct with their own rules to follow helps. Oh, and one last point - remember that as discussed here in Lesson 2, form shading does not play a role in our drawings throughout this course.

• When drawing your flower pots, I'm glad to see that you're constructing them around central minor axis lines - although where those minor axis lines really shine is in allowing us to add many ellipses to fully flesh out the entirety of the structure, rather than just leaving them to the 2 basic ones to define a cylinder. At minimum every flower pot will need to have another ellipse inset within the opening to establish the thickness of the rim, as well as one to establish the level of the soil so the plant's stem has something to intersect with.

• You have a tendency at times to build out your structures with marks as we see here. The approach shown in the branches exercise effectively shows us how we can, if and when necessary, draw a single edge with many strokes, in a manner that allows for the illusion that it is a single stroke with no gaps. Gaps are bad - they break the silhouette and remind the viewer that they're looking at a bunch of lines on a flat page. Stray/protruding tails from the strokes would do the same thing however, which is why the branch technique's manner of overlapping edges and having them flow smoothly from one to the next is very helpful for this.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I would like you to tackle the leaves exercise once more.