I found this challenge to be a mixed bag. Managing depth vs. insetting to a smaller diameter was pretty easy, but I had a really hard time thinking about silhouettes and drawing the cast shadows instead of outlining each shape. The small size and lack of 'soft' (ie: pencil sketches/pen dots) planning tools made thinking about radial spacing really difficult.
Nice work! So your construction is really solid here, as you'd mentioned yourself that you didn't find managing your ellipses' position in space vs. their scale at that particular position, and that's basically the core of what is involved in constructing wheels. You've done a great job of making the wheels more rounded, though to that point, your castor wheel would have been better had you split that center ellipse into two ellipses further out to the side. That would have reduced the sense that the wheel gets pointier, since the scale increases all the way to the center.
Now, the matter about cast shadows is what I was going to call out, specifically because you're actually still not entirely thinking in terms of cast shadows, and are at least in part applying form shading instead. The difference is basically that form shading falls on the surface of the form in question (getting darker or lighter based on their orientation relative to the light source), whereas cast shadows fall on the surrounding surfaces. This is demonstrated here, as well as in this section from the newly rewritten texture section of lesson 2.
Because it tends to muddy things, we want to avoid the form shading altogether, so on this page where you've got solid blacks right on the underside of the wheel itself (where it blends into the shadow cast along the ground), that's the sort of form shading I'm talking about. Similarly on your lego wheel you've done the same thing - placing the solid blacks along the protruding form itself, instead of along the surfaces around it.
Keeping in mind that they're different - form shading and cast shadows - and thinking about that specific difference is key. You'll probably be knocking your head a little bit, having already understood what I'm describing here, but not necessarily having thought about it while drawing. This is essentially at the core of texture as a whole, so definitely keep it in mind as you continue forwards.
As I said however, your wheel construction is very solid. Keep up the fantastic work there, and consider this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 7. You're almost there!
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.
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