To start, I'm glad to see that you appear to have used an ellipse guide here - it seems you picked up a master ellipse template as recommended, and as a result you did have to deal with the fact that its size is somewhat more limiting. I feel that this is something that may have impacted just how far you were willing to push your constructions, however, especially in combination with the use of a fineliner whose marks are inherently a lot bolder. When used in such a small space, this can certainly cause a fair bit of clumsiness.

You were absolutely right to use the ellipse guide despite that, but what I would recommend (which is encouraged throughout the wheel challenge notes in multiple places) is that you use a ballpoint pen instead. I feel this would have definitely yielded a far stronger result, due to the greater room for nuance and subtlety in how ballpoint pens work.

One of the issues that came out of the use of fineliner in combination with the limited scale is that it just seemed like you were less inclined to take your constructions farther. For example, with 16 we can see that you did not define any inner rim to the wheel (the metal structure the tire wraps around), and in many other cases - like 14 and 18 for example - it seems that there's no visible distinction between the tire's side plane and the structure of the metal rims.

I'm glad to see that when you did flesh out the spokes of the rims, you established both the outward face as well as the side planes, which helps to make the structure appear more three dimensional. With 14 you certainly did struggle with laying them out evenly, but I definitely saw improvement in this front. It would certainly have been better for you to tackle more wheels with internal rims however, as it seems that as you progressed further through the set you were actively avoiding them.

Moving onto the textural aspect of the challenge, there are a few considerations that become quite relevant here, all pertaining to the points raised back in Lesson 2's texture section. This challenge as a whole is actually something of a trap - being that we're so far removed from Lesson 2 it's very common for students to entirely forget about the principles of texture and implicit markmaking. Fortunately you did not, but there is more that we can talk about in terms of how texture should be approached.

To start though, I did want to call out that in some cases - 25 and 13 being really prominent examples - you appear to have shifted strictly to using form shading for its own sake - meaning, the goal was to make the top/bottom darker to show the curvature of the surface. In general as explained here we do not use form shading for our drawings in this course at all, although there is a bit of a grey area for cases more like 11, where you're making up that form shading through cast shadows (or at least marks that are intended to be the kind of implicit cast shadows we're meant to use for our textures).

The real focus however - and this is something that you are still struggling with, as many do - is that texture requires us to not simply look at our references and copy information over, but rather to understand the nature of the individual textural forms represented there one at a time - specifically understanding how they sit in space relative to the surfaces around them - so we can design the shadows they cast such that those shadows convey information specific to the textural form casting them.

Right now it does appear like the "understanding" stage, which you can read about more here, is minimized, though tyo varying degrees. Cases like 7 are certainly better, but 23 appears to be made up of more arbitrary marks, rather than specific shadows designed with an understanding of the forms casting them.

Now, here are some diagrams to help illustrate how we need to think about the textures we're drawing:

• This one (as well as this alternative version of it in case one makes more sense to you than the other) shows the relationships we're thinking about. Each textural form casts its own shadows, and the farther they are from our light source, the longer and deeper the shadow will be. In the texture analysis exercise we pretty much place the light source at the far right in order to achieve our gradient - in our own drawings however, we have control over where we put our light source, as long as we keep it consistent across the whole construction.

• This one which is also related directly to the texture analysis shows, step by step, how we think about the textures themselves. Traced over the melted wax reference I identify the individual globs of wax (which are our textural forms). In the row below that, I've blocked out how I'm essentially thinking about the arrangement of those forms - this wouldn't actually be drawn on the page, which is why it's faded in the next row, where we think about each textural form one at a time in order to determine the nature of the shadow it would cast. Thinking of them one at a time is paramount here - there's simply too much going on to hold it all in our heads simultaneously, but focusing on localized areas is much more manageable. And finally in the last row, those shadow shapes are filled in - approaching them in this sort of two-step process of outlining them first then filling them in allows us to focus on how we design the shadow shape first.

• Lastly this diagram shows how to approach textures consisting of holes, grooves, cracks, etc. where students are prone to thinking of the hole itself as being the textural form in question. Of course the hole is negative space - an absence of form - and it's the walls around them which cast shadows upon one another and upon the floor at the bottom of the hole. The actual result of what we end up drawing may not even be any different based on this, as there are cases where we can get away with simply filling those voids in, but it makes a difference to how we think about the textures, and how that applies to textural problems in general.

Now, while I do feel it was unfortunate that the circumstances resulted in constructions here that weren't as complete as they could have been, I am still going to mark this challenge as complete. Just be sure to keep what I've stated here in mind, and I would strongly recommend that you use a ballpoint pen for your Lesson 7 work.