Here are my 25 wheels. I used an ellipse guide for this one but I think I struggled to work with how small it made my wheels. Some of the texture work for some types of treads seemed almost impossible to do in the size available to me.
Thanks in advance for the critique
While the smaller ellipses definitely do make it a bit of a challenge, it's pretty much what most students opt for here, since full ellipse guides are prohibitively expensive. One day we hope to be able to produce our own (when I can get the guy running the drawabox pens thing a laser cutter), but until then, we do what we must!
Jumping right in with your wheels' construction, you are by and large handling this quite well. You're not limiting yourself to basic cylinders (except for 23 which I'd honestly say is kind of unfinished, but we'll overlook it since it's just the one), but rather including as many ellipses as are required to create the more complex profile of an "inflated" tire, with the bump through the midsection. You also tended to put a fair bit into the rims - I can definitely understand that one might be tempted to only put the face of the rims in when working at that scale, but I'm very pleased to see that you were mindful of those structures' side planes, giving them some thickness and helping them to feel much more solid in general.
Continuing onto the tire tread, this is where we get into the real "trap" of this challenge, but it appears you were at least somewhat ready for it. It comes down to the fact that we're pretty far removed from the textural/implicit markmaking principles from Lesson 2, and so the vast majority of students, well... just forget about it, and end up trying to outline their textural forms here. You fortunately did not - although I do think there is a little more we can squeeze out of your understanding of how to approach texture here.
So, you did a good job in opting to work more implicitly, but when we get into the "chunkier" tire tread textures - like number 15 - I noticed that where you're placing those solid black shapes isn't entirely correct. It appears that what you're doing is filling in the existing side plane of the form, rather than introducing a new shape - one for the cast shadow that would define the relationship between the textural form itself, and its surrounding surfaces.
You can see the distinction in this example I made for another student who ran into a similar issue. On the top, we've got the structural outlines for the given form - of course, since we want to work implicitly, we cannot use outlines. In the second row, we've got two options for conveying that textural form through the use of filled black shapes. On the left, they fill in the side planes, placing those shapes on the surface of the form itself, and actually filling in areas that are already enclosed and defined on the form and leaving its "top" face empty. This would be incorrect, more similar to form shading and not a cast shadow. On the right, we have an actual cast shadow - they look similar, but the key point to pay attention to is shown in the third row - it is the actual silhouette of the form itself which is implied. We've removed all of the internal edges of the form, and so while it looks kind of like the top face, but if you look more closely, it has certain subtle elements that are much more nuanced - instead of just using purely horizontal and vertical edges, we have some diagonals that come from the edges of the textural form that exist in the "depth" dimension of space (so if your horizontals were X and your verticals were Y, those diagonals come from that which exists in the Z dimension).
One rule of thumb to keep in mind is that cast shadows are never just going to fill in a space that already exists (like a defined side plane of a form). They're always - or at least, almost always - going to be their own separate shape that has to be designed, and it's the design of that shape which will define the relationship between the textural form and those surfaces around it. By that logic, it does require us to have a very specific grasp of how each textural form sits in space individually - so when you try to build up texture with more random marks to try and create a general "impression" (like number 3) it can definitely feel like you're losing control.
So! Keep that in mind, and I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 7.
Hi Uncomfy,
Just a quick note, number 23 does definitely look unfinished. This was the reference https://i.imgur.com/Lr3UnwD.jpeg which came from an album pinned in the discord channels 'advanced-challenges' channel. I wasn't sure what to add to it. I'm sure other students might find it and use it so I figured I'd give you the heads up.
It took me a few read throughs to understand your point about the cast shadows and diagrams but I think I understand it now. I was definitely guilty of doing the side plane at times.
Thanks as always for the critique.
My thinking on that skateboard wheel is that a few additional ellipses could have been added to help establish the smoother bevel that exists on the wheels. Basically the edges of the wheel aren't quite as sharp as we might see from a normal, basic cylinder. Also, since the face of the wheel curves inwards a little bit like a cup, that curvature could also be conveyed based on where we place some additional ellipses, and where they're more densely concentrated, and where they're more sparse.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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