Most students do this challenge with a smaller master ellipse template, so there's no need to apologize for that. We certainly do not expect students to sell their first born for a full ellipse guide set - they're definitely expensive. One day we hope to be able to sell those alongside the fineliners we currently sell, in order to offer them at a much more reasonable price (it's just acrylic with pieces cut out of them, after all), but at least for the moment, doing so wouldn't be feasible yet.

Anyway, jumping right into your wheels, you've largely done a pretty good job, with a couple smalle things to keep an eye on. I should mention though - numbering these would have made things a lot easier, both in terms of referencing specific ones, and being sure of the order in which they were drawn. I guess I'll assume that the images in the album are in order.

One minor concern that comes up on occasion is simply that a lot of your wheels end up feeling rather rigid, due to a lack of ellipses along their length. When you stick to the basic cylinder configuration (one ellipse on each end), it fails to create the sense of an "inflated" tire - adding another ellipse in the center, one that's a bit larger, will help with this a great bit. Of course, not all wheels actually require this, though the majority will show a bit of a bulge, as noted in this step from the challenge notes.

Continuing onto how you've tackled the rims/spokes of your wheels, you've done a pretty good job of handling these as three dimensional structures - being sure to define both front and side planes, rather than just trying to pass them off as flat shapes.

Lastly, when it comes to texture, I am quite pleased to see that across many of these, you've made a concerted effort to apply the concepts covered back in Lesson 2's texture section. The wheel challenge is actually meant to be something of a trap - being this far removed from Lesson 2, most students completely forget about it and try to tackle the tire treads entirely through explicit markmaking.

While I am pleased to see that you've definitely consciously made the effort of applying implicit markmaking, one thing to remember is that texture is about identifying and understanding how specific textural forms exist on the surface of our objects, and then using that understanding to design the shadows they'll cast. While you are definitely using implicit markmaking, and drawing shadows, your textures tend to be quite bare.

One of the major benefits of working implicitly is the fact that we can pull back on our shadows, shrink them down, and even eliminate some of them, so as to reduce how much a given texture draws attention. This african bush viper scale study is a good example of this (even though it's not a tire) - we can see how those shadows can shrink down, or expand, without changing the nature of the texture forms that the viewer understands to be present there. I could definitely tone that texture down further, eliminate more shadow shapes too, while still maintaining enough information for the viewer to fill in the blanks. There is however a lower limit on how much can be removed, and in many of your tire textures - for example this one doesn't give the impression of a believable tire tread for a few reasons:

• Firstly, you appear to be casting shadows in two opposite directions (which wouldn't happen with a single consistent light source

• Secondly, the arrangement of forms it implies doesn't really follow the actual pattern of normal tire treads - suggesting that you may not have spent enough time studying your reference image and identifying the specific forms that were there.

• Thirdly, the shadow shapes themselves are a little clumsy - part of that is undoubtedly from the size at which you were forced to draw, of course, but all the same, we do need to be fairly specific with how we design our shadow shapes.'

While this wheel and this wheel definitely provide a lot more information for the viewer to fill in the gaps, I also still feel that these don't necessarily exhibit as much observation as they probably should - though I'm not 100% sure. Basically it comes down to the fact that each of these tires show a fairly random arrangement of textural forms, and again, tire treads are anything but random. They're generally very specific, following a geometric pattern all the way around the tire's surface. The only reason I'm unsure is that while I haven't seen tires with randomness in their patterns, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't exist.

Now, I'm still going to be marking this challenge as complete - just do be sure to take a lot more time in the future to observe your references, especially when deciding how to design and where to place each individual cast shadow shape. Do not rely on memory, or on randomness - be specific, even though that will no doubt demand a lot of time from you.