10:34 PM, Thursday July 22nd 2021
Man, how does one get chocolate on their homework, without even sharing any with me!
Anywho! I think your work here has largely been done well. Trying to use a french curve on these was probably a mistake - every tool has its purpose, and french curves are more for partial curves and not really for ellipses themselves. Most students do find that the master ellipse templates are small, but that they can still work with them. It just means accepting that your wheels are indeed going to be pretty small on the page. Since you're working with tools for them, however, it's generally okay.
Looking through the wheel constructions, I can see that you have been mindful of the overall wheel structures - not just building simple cylinders, but ensuring that they widen through the middle to give that sort of "inflated" appearance. You're also paying a good bit of attention to the structure of the rims/spokes/hub caps.
Moving onto the texture of the tire treads, I noticed that you didn't end up tackling any that were particularly "chunky", and stuck to tires with shallower grooves. That's certainly fine, although it was a bit of a missed opportunity, as students tend to stumble when dealing with the larger textural forms, simply because most people don't remember the textural principles from Lesson 2 as they should, making this a good chance to remind them.
While sticking to shallower grooves certainly makes things easier, there is one issue I noticed in number 25. Here, you drew the tire grooves by basically drawing a grid over the surface of the wheels. The marks themselves were lines that crossed over the whole tire's surface, and as such they didn't take any account of the individual textural forms that are present in the texture. Remember - even when they're shallow, you want to be working on the basis of individual textural forms. So when there's a groove, you think about which forms are around that groove, and how they're casting shadows into it. This means the marks you're drawing will be broken up, rather than attempting to follow a flat pattern. When you create a grid pattern like this, you end up making it look more like it's a flat surface with some lines on it, rather than something that varies in three dimensions.
So! I do recommend that you review the principles shared in the lesson 2 texture section - but as that is necessary for most people, it won't stop me from marking this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 7, once you've had a chance to review the texture section from lesson 2.