Starting with your arrows, I noticed that your underlying, initial linework is quite confident, yielding to a smooth, fluid progression of your arrows as they move through space - although when you add line weight, you tend to do so more hesitantly in some cases. I do think that you're somewhat aware of this (there's places where you're definitely pushing yourself to execute the line weight more confidently), with varying success.

Honestly, there's no need to apply line weight so extensively. Start by drawing your initial linework more confidently. Generally your marks should all be confident and dark - fineliners, which are required for this lesson generally wouldn't give you much latitude to draw as faintly as you do here, which suggests that you're possibly working with ballpoint, or that if you are using a fineliner, you've got one that is on its last legs, and should be replaced. Either way, draw those initial marks confidently, producing rich, dark marks, and then when it comes time to add line weight, reserve it for the areas where forms overlap - like the spots where the arrows zigzag back over one another. Limiting to where those overlaps occur, and using them to clarify how they overlap as shown here, allows us to maintain confidence in our strokes without needing to worry much about them flying off track.

Continuing onto your leaves, I feel that you are definitely executing these with the confidence of your initial linework - that is to say, you're doing well with that, not only capturing how they sit statically and stiffly in space, but also how they move through the space they occupy. That said, there are a few points I want to call out:

• There are a number of places where your leaf constructions don't maintain tight, specific steps between the phases of construction. Each phase of construction essentially answers a question - for example, the initial "footprint" from step 2 of the instructions defines how big that leaf is going to be - and so, if we end up using it as the basis for a more complex construction, each of the subsequent flow lines we draw need to extend all the way to the edge of that footprint, and then each subsequent leaf should extend right to the end of its corresponding flow line, as shown here. Of course, you may have intended for that initial footprint to be much narrower - but once a mark is put down, the decision is made, and you must hold to it even if it causes you to deviate from your reference. Otherwise you risk incorporating contradictions into the construction, which will undermine its believability.

• You are also prone to skipping steps, in cases like this, as well as this one and this one. You can review these notes on skipping steps, and also take a look at this informal demo of a more complex maple leaf.

• Lastly, in leaves like this one and this one, you are prone to effectively redrawing the entire leaf on top of the previous phase of construction. This negates the benefits of the constructional approach altogether, because it renders the previous steps irrelevant. Instead, we want to allow as much of the previous stage to stand for itself as possible. As shown here, which is similar to the first of the two leaves I focused on in this point, every subsequent line defines a cut, like the path followed by scissors, to achieve the next step. I do not redraw more than is necessary, and allow parts of the outer perimeter to serve as the resulting leaf's edges, where they can. This allows the solidity that comes from the simpler states to carry forward as we build up more complexity - something that is completely lost when we redraw the whole thing.

Continuing onto your branches, I suspect that you may not have looked all that closely at the instructions for this exercise, which demonstrate that each segment should be drawn from one ellipse, past the second, and stop halfway to the third. This means that the next segment should be drawn from the second, past the third, and stop halfway to the fourth ellipse. This results in a healthy overlap between them, of about half the distance between any two ellipses, allowing for a smoother, more seamless transition from one to the next. You frequently end up minimizing this overlap - either by having your next segment start just a little past the previous one, or by not quite extending a segment fully halfway to the next ellipse. Other than that you're doing decently much of the time, but this is a very important aspect of this exercise.

Moving onto your plant constructions, my main concern overall isn't that you don't understand how to do this - but that you don't appear to be giving yourself enough time to really do it to the best of your ability. For example, if we look at how you've built up your edge detail on this one, it definitely stands out that there are little overshoots, or gaps where the edge detail marks do not cleanly meet the original silhouette of a given leaf. While mistakes certainly happen, and that's perfectly normal, these are not the result of a lack of skill - they're the result of a lack of time. Overall you have a tendency to be somewhat sketchy, and while you certainly have the capacity for it, you're not holding as closely to the markmaking concepts from Lesson 1, and tend to fall back to old habits. I cannot help but tie this back, at least in part, to the (likely, though as yet unconfirmed) use of ballpoint - it's one of the reasons we don't allow it between Lesson 2 and Lesson 5 - it simply gives students far too much latitude to slip back into old habits, and draw loosely/quickly, when they need to take their time and give each and every mark as much time as they individually require.

Aside from that, the only other point of advice that I haven't yet called out, is that it helps to construct your cylindrical flower pots around a central minor axis line, to help align the necessary ellipses, and to draw through the form with full ellipses rather than partial curves. Additionally, be sure not to just fall back to a simple cylinder - flower pots have thickness to them at the rim, which can be captured with another ellipse inset within the opening. It's also useful to provide another ellipse to represent the level of the soil, so the plant's stems have something to intersect with.

Ultimately, I think it's best we call this submission something of a wrong turn. These things happen, especially when we're focused on getting things done at a certain pace, rather than letting the work itself dictate the pace. But, ultimately, it's a turn that resulted in you not quite following the instructions nearly as well as you could have. As such, I'm going to ask for a full redo of this lesson, which when completed, will cost you 2 additional credits. I do expect this will be done with fineliner.

Also, I noticed that you had submitted Lesson 4 for community critique as well, and I just wanted to make sure you remembered that work done prior to getting the previous lesson complete is not eligible for official critique, as mentioned back in Lesson 0. We currently have a dedicated video to go over the specific rules of the official critique system (which you'll find here), although the specific rules have always been listed in Lesson 0, so I do expect that you are aware.