Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job here of drawing them with a sense of confidence and fluidity that conveys how they move through space. Do however remember that as we look farther back, you want the gaps between the zigzagging sections to compress more notably as shown here to show the depth in the scene. Also, when drawing that hatching, ensure that it stretches from edge to edge - avoid having it stop at some arbitrary point.

Moving onto your leaves, you're doing a good job of capturing that same sense of fluidity, establishing not only how the leaves sit statically in space, but also how they move through it. That said, there are some areas where you're not quite adhering as closely to the principles of construction as you could. Firstly, here you are quite notably zigzagging your more complex edge detail back and forth, an issue that is discussed here in the lesson. Additionally, for this more complex leaf structure, it's important to maintain tight, specific relationships between the different phases of construction. So to start, the initial large leaf shape answers a question - it tells us how far out the individual, smaller leaves, are going to extend. As such, when we draw each of the individual flow lines, we want to make sure that they extend right to the perimeter of the larger shape.

Construction at its core is all about taking a complex problem and breaking it down into small, individual steps - where each step answers a limited set of questions. Once answered, we want to adhere to those answers so we avoid contradicting ourselves later on in the construction. That's why maintaining tight relationships - either in a complex structure, or in how we build up our edge detail - is critical. It helps us maintain the illusion that what we're drawing is solid and three dimensional - because here's the secret: it's not. We're lying, and we need to keep that lie nice and consistent so we can get away with it.

Your branches are coming along well, although I have three recommendations:

• Firstly, be sure to more consistently extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse, as explained in the instructions. You do this sometimes, but as often you tend to extend it much less.

• Secondly, even when your edge segments go off course, when drawing the next segment, overlap that last chunk of the previous one and use it as a runway instead of drawing where it ought to have been. This will make things more difficult, but you'll learn more directly from those mistakes.

• Thirdly, I'd recommend drawing your branches larger. While you're going to have a lot of cases where you have to draw smaller branch structures in your plants, starting out with exploring things at a larger scale will help give your brain more room to work through those spatial problems. Then as you get comfortable, you can start to work in smaller spaces.

While the issues I've addressed already - like loose relationships between different phases of construction, for example - are certainly present in your plant constructions, you are otherwise doing a fairly decent job here. There are a few suggestions I will share to help keep you on the right track however.

The first point that jumped out at me is that you do have a tendency to allow yourself to be a little more sketchy when you start out your constructions. for example, if we look at this flower, we can see how you're not really committed from the get-go. You're kind of exploring things and then you go back in to commit with your darker lines once you've figured things out.

That is not how you should be approaching your work in this course. Without exception, every single mark you put down is something you're committed to. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're drawing the final edge of a form, but you're at the very least giving an answer to a question that must be upheld. We're not sketching - we're drawing, so make sure that every single mark you draw is the result of the ghosting method. That means investing all your time into the planning and preparation phases, and then executing with a confident stroke.

The other issue I wanted to address is the one you asked about yourself - fortunately, when it comes to how we work with line weight and areas of solid black, the answer is fairly straight forward. Ignore any and all "local" colour (so when the surface of something is actually dark, don't attempt to capture it with solid black in your drawing, because you wouldn't attempt to capture any other kind of colour, so there's no reason to make this a special case). Instead, reserve your areas of filled black for cast shadows only. The viewer will already make that assumption, and when you fill an area with black, their brains will go to work trying to figure what form is casting that shadow, and what surface is receiving it.

When it comes to line weight, we add it towards the end of a construction (rather than throughout the process), and we focus its use specifically where we need to clarify how different forms overlap one another. We limit its use to localized areas - rather than going back along the entire length of a form's silhouette - both to keep it focused on its purpose, and to avoid the kind of tracing that causes hesitant marks and wobbling. Here's an example of how line weight can be employed to clarify how two leaves overlap one another.

Now, I've left you with a number of things to keep in mind, but all things considered I think you should be good to move onto the next lesson. Just be sure to keep on top of what I've shared here as you move forwards through the course.