Looking at your work on this challenge, I think you've definitely shown a great deal of improvement and growth over the set. I did notice that in terms of the mandatory part of the course, you're still at Lesson 3 - normally we recommend that students tackle the texture challenge in parallel with the other lessons, as this allows them to benefit more directly from the gradual development of their spatial reasoning skills, which our course targets most specifically in the constructional drawings from lessons 3-7 - but as a whole, you do appear to have made good use of this task.

Early on in the set, and extending up until texture 18 or so - I noticed that a few issues were fairly prevalent, to varying degrees:

• A strong tendency to work in individual one-off strokes, rather than adhering to the methodology explained in these reminders, where by leveraging a two step process of first outlining the intended shape, then filling it in, we're able to take the results of our observations and, based on our understanding of what they tell us about the 3D forms that are present, determine what kinds of shadows they might cast to be leveraged more effectively as part of our gradients. The tendency to work with more one-off strokes is also tied to the tendency to outline our textural forms, rather than only drawing the shadows they cast so as to fully leverage implicit markmaking. It also can cause us to fill areas in without necessarily considering the nature of the shadow we're trying to cast - for example, in texture 16, rather than casting shadows you were mainly just filling in the gaps between the textural forms.

• A tendency to cast shadows in the wrong direction - although the last clear case of this I noticed was 13, where the scales were casting shadows to the right. Since we're aiming to achieve a gradient that goes fully black to the left, and fully white to the right, our light source is going to be on the far right, casting shadows towards the left. Getting the direction reversed would make blending that hard black bar into the gradient much more difficult.

Ultimately what drives our textures is, at its core, cast shadows. Of course, we can only convey these properly by understanding the forms that are meant to cast them, which in turn we can only identify by observing them individually. Understanding the forms as they exist in 3D space, in combination with the light source being far to the right, allows shadows to be cast farther and farther, the more to the left we're looking on the gradient. As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. I think your efforts towards this end were pretty clear throughout, although it was not something that came easily - you fought for every inch of ground gained.

One point where you did momentarily show a very strong grasp of this (sometimes things start to flicker into our understanding for a moment, then disappear again, only to come back later more consistently and reliably), is with the water ripple texture from number 9. What's particularly interesting about this is that water is a terrible choice for a texture, simply because its translucency makes it much harder to work with. Many students fixate on trying to capture the translucency, but you handled this extremely well, treating the liquid structure as forms, and focusing entirely on the shadows they'd cast, steadily deepening them the further to the left you went.

Where your textures come back around to demonstrate that understanding clicking in a more reliable fashion, is around texture 19. Here you've dropped the one-off strokes and focused almost entirely on working with filled black shapes, and that carries forward through the rest. As a result, textures like your octopus tentacles come through very clearly, with a great sense of form.

The only issue that really remains is that the black bar to the left remains unobscured, at least in part. As noted here, we do want it to blend into the rest of the gradient, to the point that we should not be able to identify where it ends, and the texture begins. The solution for this is to allow those shadows to project that much more the further to the left you go. This can be uncomfortable for students at first, because they don't want to cover up the carefully crafted detail they've created - but ultimately, that is what the exercise demands.

Anyway! All in all, very solid growth, especially considering that you tackled this sooner than we generally expect to see it. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.