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8:42 PM, Monday January 27th 2025

Jumping right in, the 25 wheel challenge is something of a trap, and we've found that presenting it as such (in the sense of allowing students to make a mistake without first reminding them not to do it, as making the mistake and having it called out makes the lesson much more effective for its purposes) helps students more in general, even if it involves some unpleasantness.

That trap is to do with texture - being as far removed from Lesson 2 as we are, it's extremely common for students to forget that we talk about texture at all, and those who do remember it tend to try and apply what they remember more than actually going back and reviewing the material. This is very common - extremely common, even. And the reason I'm saying it is that you appear to be one of a very few who actually seems to have consciously attempted to apply implicit markmaking when conveying your tire textures, and as such, focused on attempting to draw the shadows your textural forms were casting, rather than drawing them directly.

This is by no means an easy thing to do, and if I got that many attempts that actually consciously tried to employ implicit markmaking/cast shadows, it would be extremely normal for their attempts to still have tons of little issues, as they try and sort out the very complicated matter of designing a cast shadow without first having drawn and defined the form that is casting it. But the intent matters a great deal.

Wheel 6 on this page is easily the clearest example of working with cast shadows, and even there I can see some shadows which appear to be drawn more as though they're the side plane of the textural form itself - this is where most students who try and apply the methodology by memory end up fumbling, as form shading still involves drawing the textural form, and therefore is still explicit markmaking. But no matter - I'm not worried about a few mistakes, as like I said, the intent is what matters. It shows that you're working in the right direction, and while there may be the odd hiccup, what I want to see is that you're pushing in the right direction.

It's this understanding of the 3D space - of the space the textural form occupies, of the space the surfaces around it occupy, and how the cast shadow being projected needs to be designed very specifically to convey that spatial relationship between them, that is tricky. It ultimately relies on exactly the same concept Drawabox pushes as a whole (spatial reasoning), and so we introduce the concept back in Lesson 2 to help direct what students learn naturally by doing the constructional drawing exercises from lessons 3-7. But still, it's pretty easy to end up trying to rely more on guesswork to try and imply texture without it getting so detail dense that it immediately draw's the viewer's eye whether you want it to or not (which is a concern relating to composition, so outside of the scope of this course, but still something we want to try and impart some tools to help with down the line).

Throughout your work however, I am seeing a lot of that word I keep using: intent. I see signs that you're thinking through the spatial relationships between your forms, and while you're not always consistent in working with cast shadow, and do sometimes slip back into filling in side planes, by and large I can see that your brain's gears are turning in the right direction.

As far as that is concerned, there's just one thing I want you to keep in mind: 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.

As to the other aspect of this challenge - the structural component - your work is coming along swimmingly. I did notice a little confusion at times in terms of dealing with the various spokes of your rims (like here with number 6 at one point you end up swapping the front face and side plane of a given spoke), but all in all your work here shows clear consideration to how those forms sit in 3D space, not just as flat shapes on a page.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the great work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto Lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:18 AM, Sunday February 2nd 2025
edited at 4:21 AM, Feb 2nd 2025

Hi Uncomfortable, thank you for your feedback and encouragement!

As you mentioned, I struggled a lot with drawing the cast shadows without first drawing the forms, and at some points ended up drawing the forms explicitly first anyway.

I'll be sure to review the insights you've provided and apply them to the final lesson!

edited at 4:21 AM, Feb 2nd 2025
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