Looking over your work, one thing that really stood out to me is that with your first pages (I assume this is in chronological order), you definitely put a lot more time into your texture gradients, allowing them to be much more complex and developed, and that steadily decreased over the course of the set. With your first couple of textures, you were fairly strict in terms of adhering to these reminders from the texture section of Lesson 2, which outline the methodology we want to employ due to how it shifts the focus from only being about observation to a process that also includes thinking about the forms we're seeing as they exist in 3D space, and making decisions on how to design our cast shadows to reflect that understanding.

Once you hit the third texture or so, you start being more willing to break away from that process, and so we see a few one-off strokes here and there, where rather than first designing a shape, then filling it in, you're allowing yourself to draw them directly. Nothing egregious, just a little here and there. Into the enxt page this continues at first, although then you seem to catch yourself and more firmly enforce that more laborious process of designing shapes, and perhaps become more discerning on allowing yourself to leave marks that might be too small to really exist further to the right side of the gradient out entirely. These are correct decisions - the goal is to create a gradient where the solid black bar on the left blends smoothly into the shadow shapes of our texture.

This blending of the black bars is something that you tend to forget about more frequently further into the set, and I think that goes hand in hand with the tendency for your approach to the textures to be heavily simplified, giving you less structure and fewer sources of cast shadows to work with. That can still be made to work, but in effect you have to force those cast shadows towards the far left to get so big that it can feel awkward and strage. It's still valid, given that we're operating off the notion that, 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. But by arguably simplifying the problem, you're giving yourself less to work with, and are making it considerably harder. A simple solution for this - though it does increase how much time the task will take you - is to zoom back out from whatever small portion of your textured surface you're drawing.

I believe this page is one of the more successful ones later in the set, where you included more complexity, and thus had more to work with. I think the tortoise shell is especially well done, although this can be pushed farther by exaggerating those shadows as they're cast to the right, as shown here. This may be better conveyed with the cheese texture where I exaggerated the shadows to the right - although I will admit that I did this prior to realizing that it was meant to be cheese, in which case you've got the shadows inverted. The light source is coming from the right, so the shadows you're drawing should be cast in the opposite direction - so for the purposes of this example, imagine that the texture is actually something with little protruding bumps on it instead.

Looking at your fur texture, overall what you did is moving in the right direction, but again - you're not giving yourself much to work with, and so you're trying to start a fire with no fuel. Zoom back out so you have more of those clumps of fur that can cast shadows upon one another. Furthermore, arrange the fur so it flows more consistently from right to left, and lastly, as with all of these textures, don't be afraid to let those shadows project farther out. Here's what might result.

The last thing I wanted to offer is this diagram which illustrates how the overall process for this exercise, starting not from a reference image that is already laid out from a top-down view, but a more normal view not specifically tailored to this exercise. Much of this may already be familiar to you, but I like providing it to kind of cover all the bases and catch anything I may have missed.

• First in the traceover of the reference image, we're identifying the kinds of forms that are present and how they vary/how they're similar.

• Then in the first rectangle labeled "the forms we're transferring" this is more of an idea of how we would, in our heads, think about arranging those textural forms on our surface based on what we saw in the reference.

• Next in the rectangle labeled "how we're thinking about the cast shadows" are the actual lines we'd be drawing to design those cast shadow shapes, based on our understanding of the relationship between each textural form and the surfaces around it. The forms from the previous step are faded out here, because again - they weren't drawn. This is definitely the most challenging part, because working implicitly requires us to think about multiple forms simultaneously without drawing them - though not all at once, more a small handful including the one whose shadow you wish to design, and those whose surfaces that shadow might touch.

• And finally, we'd fill in those shadow shapes.

• Once the shadow shapes are in, while we can't take away from them (since we're working in ink), we can add to them to extend our cast shadows as needed to adjust and push the gradient.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.