As a whole, I think that your work throughout the texture challenge has shown that you do indeed largely grasp the concepts that we try to focus upon when engaging with texture in this course, although there are a few situations that I believe some further explanation would help to clarify, and some elements of the exercise itself that should be called out to ensure that, should you leverage this exercise in the future, you can do so to the fullest.

So to start, the most important thing when it comes to how we engage with texture in this course is the fact that we do so exclusively through implicit markmaking, by drawing the shadows those textural forms cast on their surroundings, rather than drawing the textural forms themselves (whether by outlining them, applying form shading to them, or otherwise). Those cast shadows will fall on other surrounding surfaces, which will often include other textural forms, and so it's not that every form is left perfectly blank - but that the mark itself being drawn is always a shadow being cast from the form in question at that moment, onto the surfaces around it, and the shape that shadow takes itself defines the relationship in 3D space between the form and surfaces in question.

One of the things we introduce in Lesson 2, is the methodology of always approaching textural marks through a two-step process, first outlining/designing the intended shadow shape, then filling it in, as discussed in these reminders. While this is definitely an approach you've used extensively, there are definitely still numerous places where you've opted to draw marks in other ways (generally a matter of drawing a single stroke that does not enclose a shape to be filled), as we see in places like the elephant skin, feathers,m brickwork, some of your silk folds, the edges of your honeycomb structures, and so forth.

To that end, it is worth noting that in my feedback on your Lesson 2 textural work, I did stress the following:

You do have cases where you still shift to drawing one-off strokes without adhering to this process, which makes it easier to slip back into drawing directly from observation (without the "understanding" phase where we identify what the things we observe tell us about the 3D forms that are present), so do keep pushing yourself to adhere to that process.

In effect, when dealing with any textural problem throughout this course, we want you to do so in this specific manner to the exclusion of all others. While it's true that there are certainly going to be shadows that are cast that are so small they can't reasonably be executed using our two step methodology, in such cases it's better to actually leave them out, for the following reasons:

• A designed shape, despite not being something we can create quite as small as a one-off stroke, tapers in a more nuanced, delicate fashion, whereas a one-off stroke is more likely to end in a manner that feels more sudden. Thus, the shapes lean better into our goal of creating a gradient that transitions from black to white (and ultimately we have to pick a point for the shadows to drop off altogether anyway, so pushing a little farther with singular strokes isn't strictly necessary).

• Drawing in one-off strokes allows us to lean more into drawing directly from observation (as opposed to observing, understanding the forms that we see as they exist in 3D space, then creating shadows based on that understanding), which can be very tempting as it can allow us to create more visually pleasing things without all of the extra baggage of thinking in 3D. But of course, 3D spatial reasoning is the purpose of this course.

In those places where you relied more heavily on outlining structures and one-off strokes - like your brickwork texture on this page, you more frequently ran into issues where you were forced to choose an arbitrary point at which a textural mark would have to end, and that arbitrary nature of the choice is very visible. The marks defining the bricks stop very suddenly, rather than feeling like a natural progression. This highlights the big distinction between using explicit markmaking (as you did there), and the kind of implicit markmaking we see in examples like the tire tracks in sand from this page. For the tire tracks, there is no sudden jump. The shadows continue to shrink in scale gradually, until they simply are no longer visible. This creates the understanding in the viewer's brain that just because those shadows can no longer be seen, doesn't mean that the textural forms, the structures that cast them, no longer do. This is how we are able to imply detail, to create the impression in the viewer's mind that there is far more detail than what has actually been drawn, and is a key aspect to how we can convey the information we mean to, without losing control of the composition of the illustration (where packing tons of actual drawn detail will inevitably draw the viewer's eye to it).

It all comes back to the cast shadows, and ensuring that the marks we draw do behave as cast shadows. 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. It is this simple truth, that the same form can cast very different shadows depending on where they are in the scene, that gives us the kind of control - to say here, I want the shadows to each stand distinct from one another, so as to create a lot of concentrated visible detail, and that there, I want the shadows to be so large as to merge together, or for them to be so small that they're blocked from view by the forms casting them, so as to allow that texture to give way to areas with much less contrast (so as not to draw the viewer's eye).

This also means that when you're creating those filled black shapes, you need to be conscious of the fact that they are cast shadows, and therefore they are being cast in a particular direction. In this exercise, it's consistent - the light source is on the far right, and so that's where those shadows are smallest, and why the further to the left we go, the longer those shadows stretch until they all fuse together. If however we forget about this, we can end up with shapes that seem like cast shadows, but work against us - like in the leaf veins on this page, which are not limited to casting shadows to the left, but also seem to cast shadows to the right, (as well as substantially downwards). The lack of consistency breaks the illusion, and so as we reach the far right where we'd rely on the viewer's brain to fill in the gaps, it still feels quite sudden, and does not give the impression that those veins continue.

It can also be tempting to find existing shapes in the structures that you can simply fill in - the orange on this page is a good example of this, where the shapes you've filled there do not really feel as though they imply any present structure that might cast such shadows. Of course, the reason for that is clear - they were never designed for that purpose, but rather were drawn and filled directly based on observation, skipping that intermediate step of "understanding", as discussed in the reminders linked towards the beginning of my critique.

This is a common pitfall we run into specifically when dealing with textures that involve a lot of shallow grooves, holes, cracks, etc. and so we see it in the elephant skin as well. 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.

You were definitely on the right track in terms of how you were handling your cheese texture at the very end, although you got the direction of the shadows inverted. As shown in the diagram above, the walls along the left side of the holes would receive the light, whereas you've got the lit portion set along the rightmost edge of each hole.

The last thing I wanted to mention is simply a reminder not to forget that the goal of the gradient is indeed to create something that transitions seamlessly from full white on the far right, to full black on the far left. The solid black bar on the left serves to remind us of this, with the intent being that our shadows should eventually get large enough to obfuscate where the edge of the black bar actually is. You did approach this reasonably well in many cases, but there were still cases like the sand dunes in number 10, the cheese in 25, and the tire tracks in number 17 where the black bar crept up very suddenly (due to the scale of the texture and how far the shadows themselves were being pushed did not factor in this requirement), and other cases like 15's coffee beans and 8's feathers obfuscated the edge somewhat, but definitely still felt like a very sudden increase in the shadow density.

Don't forget - you control the scale at which your texture is being represented, and so if for the purposes of this exercise you need to "zoom out" so you can pack in more textural structures to give you more meaningful shadows to work with, then that is entirely up to you.

Anyway! As a whole, you've definitely shown a great deal of progress and growth in this regard, although there are certainly points that I've laid out here for you to keep in mind as you continue to progress forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.