Starting with the structural aspect of the challenge, you've done quite well. No doubt it wasn't easy to mind structural elements like ensuring that your spokes/hub caps featured not only outward faces but also side planes to give them thickness, when working at such a small scale, but I'm glad that you opted to work with an ellipse guide despite its limitations. I'm also pleased to see that you were mindful of not simply creating simple, straight cylinders, but considering the widening of the midsection to create the impression that the tire is inflated, and would land with a bounce rather than a heavy thud.
When it comes to the textural aspect of the challenge, you're right - it didn't really click entirely until the end, and even there, there's probably some advice I can offer to help solidify those concepts a bit more firmly. But what's important to me is that you worked through the problem and you ultimately went back to the processes and concepts presented in Lesson 2. While you started by employing explicit markmaking techniques, and shading surfaces in with hatching, you steadily shifted more towards implicit markmaking.
It is admittedly as yet unclear whether you actually went back to the Lesson 2 texture material, or whether you made this shift naturally as you encountered the challenges explicit markmaking brought on - like the fact that explicit markmaking creates the expectation that anything that hasn't been drawn simply doesn't exist (in the sense that if you only draw some of the textural forms, it's not going to create the circumstances where the viewer's own mind will fill the gaps in). Most students don't pick up on those issues though, because of how the sheer detail density required to convey some of these textures through explicit means can work decently when we're limited to just looking at wheels floating in a void. Of course, once we draw these wheels as part of a larger construction or illustration, all of that detail creates a focal point, pulling the viewer's eye to it whether we want them to look there or not.
Implicit markmaking on the other hand, by drawing the shadows those textural forms cast rather than the forms themselves, provides the circumstances necessary for the viewer's subconscious to understand that there may still exist some unseen form in those gaps. This is because cast shadows can be drawn at any size without specifically changing the nature of the form. Rather, if lit from a light source hitting it at a shallow angle, it'll project the shadow farther, but if hit from a much sharper angle, it'll project a fairly limited shadow as depicted here. We don't strictly have to worry about exactly where the light source is for our purposes here - but the simple fact that a single form can ostensibly cast a longer shadow, or a shorter one, or virtually no visible shadow at all, gives us the freedom to control where our shadows get so big that they blend into one another, or where our shadows get so small that some of them get entirely blasted away - two options we can use when we want to reduce the detail density and avoid creating unintentional focal points in our illustrations.
One thing that's worth mentioning is that when it comes to those tires with shallow grooves, or really any texture consisting of holes, cracks, etc. it's very common for us to view these named things (the grooves, the cracks, etc.) as being the textural forms in question - but of course they're not forms at all. They're empty, negative space, and it's the structures that surround these empty spaces that are the actual forms for us to consider when designing the shadows they'll cast. This is demonstrated in this diagram. This doesn't always actually result in a different result at the end of the day, but as these are all exercises, how we think about them and how we come to that result is just as important - if not moreso. Given that a lot of your tire treads were of this sort, with fairly shallow grooves, this is something that you likely came across a fair bit, although you may not have been entirely conscious of it.
Anyway! All in all, you made a solid effort to tackle the textural aspect of this challenge well, and you certainly approached it in the right direction. If you need to and hadn't already in this process, certainly review the texture material from Lesson 2 (starting specifically from these reminders, which help to encapsulate the approach as a whole), but I will certainly mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto Lesson 7.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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