Before I get to my actual critique of your work, I want to call out one very important point. You appear to have gone straight into the texture challenge immediately after completing Lesson 2 about a month ago. The instructions for the texture challenge state:

do not plan to complete this challenge in one go. I strongly encourage you to do it in parallel with the other drawabox lessons, completing it one row at a time.

The reason for this is that it will give you the opportunity to process what you're learning and internalize your own discoveries. These aren't things the brain does quickly - it often requires long periods of time away from the task in question in order for the concepts to properly sink in. Grinding away at it simply won't give you that.

In deciding to tackle this challenge all at once, you've very much not followed these instructions, and severely undermined the benefit you would have gained from spreading the exercise out over a much longer span of time, while working through the other lessons, gradually developing your spatial reasoning skills there, and then allowing that to reflect on how you tackled textures (which very much is all about understanding the spatial relationships between forms, just at a smaller scale).

I did weigh whether or not I should do the critique, and ultimately came down on the side that I would - but it's important that you understand that you've severely undermined the exercise by not following those instructions (and in so doing, are relying on the critique without having done the work as you should have). The reason I am going to do the critique is largely to point out the other instructions that were not really followed here, though I will provide some additional diagrams to help you better understand the task at hand.

With that out of the way, let's get started. First, let's touch on some important points from the notes:

• These notes from the texture section explain that these exercises are about more than just observation. It's a common mistake students make, simply focusing on staring at their reference, and then drawing what they see - but this skips a very important step of understanding how what they see conveys to them the presence of specific forms. There are some textures where you definitely do this - for example, the cement texture with the very thick, goopy drips. Here you identified the nature of each individual blob of cement, and focused on establishing the shadow it cast. But when you get into textures with a lot more going on, you tend to think less about individual textural forms, one by one, but rather you try to get away with putting down more random marks, as we see here. Your goal ends up being different - instead of being an analysis of the forms that are present, and seeing how you can imply their presence one by one through the use of cast shadows, your focus shifts to creating the impression of the texture however you can - and so you end up putting marks down haphazardly, hoping for the best.

• These notes describe one of the "common mistakes" for this texture analysis exercise - where students tend to draw the textural forms themselves, outlining them completely, instead of relying entirely on cast shadow shapes to imply the presence of the forms. We can see this here, in both of these, and in many other places to varying degrees. While it's not abnormal for students to struggle with understanding the nature of each form without drawing it first, the solution is not to outline them instead. The solution is to try working without outlines in every case, accepting that some of them are simply not going to come out well as a result.

• In this section of the instructions for this exercise, we talk about the purpose served by the solid black bar on the far left, and that the goal is to make point at which that bar ends and the texture begins unidentifiable - meaning, we want a smooth transition from solid black into the texture. These notes also address this in further detail. You tend to jump back and forth between simply leaving a solid black bar with a visible edge and a sudden jump into the texture (as we see here), and attempting to create more of a transition as we see here. The latter is what you should be trying to do for all your textures.

• As an extension of the previous point, there are cases where you tried to achieve a smoother transition by using hatching lines, as we see here. Don't do this when tackling this exercise in the future - you should only be using filled areas of solid black, which are meant to represent the shadows cast by specific forms. These shadow shapes would be specifically designed based on capturing the relationship between the form casting it and the surface receiving it, and you'd tackle it by first outlining the shadow shape, then filling it in.

In general, the tendency not to think of textures as individual forms present on a surface, but rather trying to capture the impression of a given texture is the big issue here. What you're being asked to do is very time consuming, as it requires us to think about each individual form, one at a time. There's no way around that. Of course, there's nothing requiring you to complete a single texture in one sitting, or in a single day. You give each and every drawing you do as much time as you need to execute it to the best of your ability, applying your understanding of the instructions (and reviewing those instructions frequently).

Moving forward, I do have some diagrams to share with you to help you understand this exercise a little better.

Firstly, this one (or alternatively this one, they're depicting the same thing but one may make more sense to you than the other) illustrates what we see in a texture if we're looking right across the surface from a very low angle. The forms actually protrude from the surface.

What allows us to end up with more shadows (or rather bigger shadows) along the far left is the shallower angle of the light rays that hit it. This results in much longer shadows being cast, the further to the left we go. This also helps with blending in with that solid black bar.

Secondly, this diagram shows the texture gradient for a melted wax texture, except it also demonstrates how we think about the problem.

• The first row shows what we're thinking about - individual forms, the space they occupy, and how they relate to one another in space. This is something you'd be doing in your head, not actually drawing on the page - again, it's hard, but it's more important to try to do it as intended, rather than changing the exercise into something that is easier, but not tackling the same problem and developing the same skills.

• The second row shows the actual shadows we want to draw - based on our understanding of the forms in play (the faded lines from the previous row), we're designing the shadows we think they would cast. Those shadows are smaller to the right, where they're closer to the light source, and gradually get longer/broader as we move to the left, allowing us to create a smoother transition into that solid bar.

• And finally the third row shows the result.

The last diagram I wanted to share is this one. Textures involving holes, grooves, or even weave patterns like fabric or this old blanket can be especially tricky because students end up focusing on the holes as being the forms in question. In fact, they're not - they're an absence of form. What they need to be focusing on are the forms around the holes, which are the structures that cast shadows.

The old blanket's a good example for this, as you focused on drawing what was effectively a grid of lines. This doesn't give you the opportunity to think about the actual forms at play, just a very simplified pattern to repeat. Instead, you need to be thinking about each thread, and how it's casting shadows on its neighbouring threads, and into the gaps between them. Consider how the shadows wrap around the curved surfaces of the threads as well.

What drawing the blanket texture as a grid of lines like this eliminates is the fact that woven fabric like this has threads that actually go both under and over one another. We don't end up with a simple grid - the actual texture is vastly more complex than that.

Now, I am not going to be marking this challenge as complete, but I am also going to ask that you not attempt to do it all over again right now. You can certainly take another swing at it, but you should be spreading it out over a long period of time, while focusing most of your time on the core lessons.

So for now, move onto Lesson 3, as Tofu previously instructed.