Looking at your organic arrows, these are definitely drawn with a great deal of confidence as they push across the page. You are however correct - there are two main issues that are coming up here:

• You need to be compressing the space between the zigzagging sections as shown here to better establish the depth in the scene. Right now you tend to keep the spacing more consistent, which breaks the rules of perspective (that is, things get smaller as they move away from the viewer, including empty spaces).

• While you are allowing your edges to overlap, you still run into certain aspects of this issue, where as your arrow turns in space, it compresses the "inner" side and stretches the "outer" side. Since we are generally to assume that our arrows are not made of a flexible material, we have to ensure that they twist in a way that allows both side edges to remain the same length throughout the whole arrow.

Moving onto your leaves, despite the fact that you definitely went a little heavy on the detail/texture here, you did still maintain the overall fluidity and confidence of your leaves, capturing not only how they sit in 3D space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. You also built up that more complex edge detail well, adhering to the edges from the previous phases of construction in most cases.

I did however notice that you appear to have a tendency to redraw those edges in their entirety, effectively replacing the previous phase of construction with a whole new drawing each time, which isn't quite correct. As shown here on another student's work, all we're doing is drawing in the parts that change. So rather than having a single wavy line zigzag back and forth, you should only be drawing individual bumps rising off the previous edge and returning to it, then stopping as shown here.

Continuing onto your branches, these are done decently, but there's a key shortcoming I'm seeing throughout most of these. In many cases, you're not extending your segments fully halfway to the next ellipse, resulting in much less of an overlap from one segment to the next. As shown here in the instructions, that overlap is an important tool for allowing us to transition more smoothly and seamlessly from one segment to the next. Aside from that, however, you're doing quite well.

Now, going onto the plant constructions, I want to address something I mentioned about your leaves, which is certainly the case throughout these constructions - you have definitely gone overboard with detail and texture, in a way that suggests your priorities may be a little incorrect.

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. So don't think of it as though the texture/detail phase is where you get to go crazy decorating your drawing without purpose. Every single mark we draw serves a purpose, and we need to be specifically aware of what we're trying to convey to the viewer.

Furthermore, do not forget about the core principles from the texture section of lesson 2. Every textural mark we draw defines a cast shadow, and so we cannot simply draw marks freely - we need to be aware of precisely what textural form we're trying to imply, and what kind of shadow it would cast. To help with this, we can force ourselves to draw all of our marks using this two-step process, as it helps us avoid simply putting down individual strokes for our marks.

A second point I'd like to make is about the importance of drawing big. Right now you've definitely gone to considerable lengths to fit lots of drawings into each page. While that is admirable, you did so by purposely limiting the amount of room each drawing would have to work in, often overestimating those limitations to compress the drawings even further. Instead, focus on giving each drawing as much room as it requires on the page, first and foremost. Once the first drawing is done, assess whether or not there is enough room for another drawing. If there is, use it. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have a page featuring just a single drawing.

The reason space on the page is important is that it is one of the tools our brain requires to work through spatial problems (in three dimensions). When that is limited, our brain will tend to work more clumsily. Similarly, it also makes it much harder to engage our whole arm when drawing, resulting in the same kind of clumsiness in the execution of our marks.

Moving onto your actual constructions, there are a number of issues I'd like to draw your attention to:

• When drawing your flower pots, or anything cylindrical, construct them around a central minor axis line, and do not just leave them as basic cylindrical forms. These flower pots have much more complexity to them - they've got thickness to their rims (which can be defined by two ellipses, an outer and an inner one), they sometimes have other flourishes or points where they get narrower or wider. Each of these elements can be captured by adding another cross-sectional ellipse to their construction, which then makes that minor axis line all that much more useful in helping to keep them aligned.

• While we can very easily add complexity to the edges of a flat form like a leaf or petal, when our forms have actual 3D volume to them, simply modifying the silhouette will actually flatten out the form. In such cases, we have to actually build new forms up on top of that existing structure, wrapping them around as they'd exist in 3D space. This is something we get into much more in the next lesson, but here's an example of what I mean. Compare this to your fern drawings, where you simply redrew the silhouette of those forms to add a more complex, bumpier outline. For similar reasons, cutting back into the silhouettes of your 3D forms is a bad idea.

• Looking at your Ficus Benjamina drawing, I noticed that you drew the flower pot with a fainter construction, and then traced back over it. Don't trace back over your lines, and don't attempt to replace linework with a "clean up pass" either. The marks you drew initially should be clear and bold, without any attempt to hide them. Every mark you draw defines solid structures in the world, and once in place, they cannot be replaced in this manner. They have to be dealt with. This goes for all construction. Don't treat it like a loose sketch. Treat it like solid forms you're placing in the world.

• Looking at the same flower pot, it looks like you reversed the relationship between the top ellipse and bottom ellipse. The base should be the one with the wider degree.

The drawings you did along with the demonstrations are definitely visibly stronger than your own drawings, likely for a couple reasons:

• I suspect you're drawing them bigger

• They're less demanding because they don't require as much careful observation/study of your reference image, clearing your brain up to focus more on drawing the individual marks and forms to the best of your ability. That simply means that when drawing your own stuff, you need to take your time, plan out your marks, and avoid rushing yourself through the process. You have all the time in the world, and therefore you are able to invest as much time as you require to execute every mark using the ghosting method, with appropriate planning and preparation, and finally a confident execution free from hesitation.

Overall you're definitely moving in the right direction, but I do want you to work a little more on the points I've raised here. As such, I'm going to assign a few additional pages below. Be sure not to worry so much about texture and detail, and instead to focus that time on the core construction, ensuring that the structure is solid and believable. Structure without detail will read just fine. Detail without structure will fall apart.

To answer your last question, you can get started on the 25 texture challenge at any time after lesson 2. It is not a mandatory part of the course, but you certainly have the option of starting on it. Just be sure to work on it in parallel with the rest of the course, as explained in its notes. You are not expected to grind through this all at once, because the time spent in between each texture study allows us to process what we're learning from them.