Congrats on getting through the challenge! Overall your work here is coming along quite well, although I do have a number of points to draw to your attention that should help you continue to get the most out of engaging with texture in the context of this course. To that point, I should reiterate that the approach we push here is very much about the course. It's not about texture in general, although it can be very useful in better understanding how to leverage texture as a tool for your own illustrations. But the way we explore the concept here is very specific because it comes back to the focus of the course. Texture is just another lens through which we look at spatial reasoning, and the relationships between the forms we're working with in 3D space.

To that end, the first point I wanted to call out is that it really helps get the most out of this exercise to focus on drawing all of our textural marks using the two-step methodology outlined in these reminders from the texture section - that is, outlining/designing our intended shadow shapes, then filling them in, as opposed to simply diving in and putting down one-off strokes directly. 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.

Now you've definitely done a good job of using this methodology a great deal - in fact, you've used it very extensively throughout your work, and I think that has increased the further in you got which is great to see. I just wanted to reiterate, since there are still spots where you hit that threshold where you switch to one-off strokes, that you'll get the most out of this exercise by sticking to that approach.

The next point I wanted to mention is that something you did seem to struggle with somewhat was the gradient aspect of the texture gradients. That is, specifically achieving a smooth transition from black to white, using the texture (specifically the shadows those textural forms cast) to gradually shift from dark to light.

Ultimately the mechanism we rely on to achieve these gradients relies on the light source itself being far to the right, with the greater the distance from that light source a textural form is, the longer a shadow it will cast, 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.

There are cases where this doesn't work so well, but those situations are a lot less common than one might think. For example, in your elephant skin, you've basically got a surface with cracks along it, and so if that surface were perfectly even (all of the non-crack portions being at the same height), the shadows would only be cast into the cracks, and not beyond them. The cracks themselves are a problem in and of themselves (this diagram may help with that, although while in this texture you simply filled the cracks in, I can see in your honey comb texture that you're considering where the shadows themselves are cast, and not just defaulting to filling the holes in entirely), but there aren't a lot of textures outside of specifically machined materials where the surfaces are so perfectly level. For the elephant skin for example, the edges of the cracks themselves may be at different heights, causing them to potentially cast shadows that spill over onto the surface beyond the crack itself.

When it comes to the way in which we use texture in this course (which itself is fairly limited), it's largely a matter of identifying what we can get away with to achieve what we're after. So for example, because of the mechanics that allow the same textural forms to cast shadows of different lengths due to their distance from the light source, this gives us a lot more freedom in deciding whether we want our textures to be heavy on the blacks or whites (basically resulting in low contrast, and thus not pulling too much of the viewer's attention), or if we want to be somewhere in the middle where there's more white/black juxtaposition creating a stronger focal point to draw the viewer's eye, even without necessarily being consistent with the light source itself. Similarly, we can leverage the fact that surfaces that are not specifically a consistent height all the way through, to give ourselves reasons to have certain shadows cast beyond their corresponding cracks, in order to control our results and shift from different levels of textural detail density.

One thing students sometimes do get a bit hung up on though is that with all of these shadows being cast all over the place, it's unlikely that your texture is really going to be entirely identifiable everywhere. Hell, sometimes the texture on its own isn't identifiable at all. Texture plays a lot of roles, and its purpose in a given drawing can vary. It can be important to clearly convey the nature of a given surface (although this doesn't need to be all over the place - it can be a certain area of a texture that looks identifiable, with the rest being blank, or covered in shadow, or whatever else). But sometimes it's just a matter of achieving visual complexity to create a focal point, of describing form through form shading (which we don't really do much of in this course), etc. so even though everything being applied as intended for this exercise can look weird, that isn't inherently an issue.

Anyway! As a whole, your work here is quite well done. You have clearly put a significant amount of focus on cast shadows, showing that you are thinking about the relationships in space between the forms casting them and the surfaces receiving them, and you're demonstrating excellent observational skills overall.

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