Congratulations on getting through the texture challenge! It's definitely a tough one, and demands a great deal of patience, and explores the core concepts we explore throughout the course (3D spatial reasoning) in a very different form that can ultimately help solidify our overall grasp of how forms of different natures relate to one another in 3D space.

Looking over your work, there are a number of places where I can offer advice to help you continue to think about this problem in a way that will help work towards our goals. I can also see that over the course of the set you've made some progress yourself in addressing some of these concerns. One of these is to do with the solid black bar (as well as the solid white bar) we place on either end of the gradient portions of each individual texture analysis. Towards the beginning, you kind of ignored it beyond laying the bar itself out superficially. As explained in this section of the lesson material, as well as in this further explanation of the relatively common mistake. As you pushed further into the set, you were more aware of the black bar, and made more effort to blend it more seamlessly into the texture gradient, but there were certain aspects of your approach that made this more difficult to achieve.

One of these is that you tend to approach laying out your textures by first establishing the outlines of the textural forms themselves. For example, if we look at the pebbles texture on number nine from this page, we can see that you meticulously drew the outline of each stone until you hit the solid white bar on the end, resulting in the outlines you had been drawing there being cut off.

The problem with that is that it kind of locks you into the very explicit markmaking we want to avoid. The reason for this can be seen in what happens when we transition to the solid white bar - those outlines stop pretty hard. Even if we tapered them so they didn't stop quite so suddenly, the form itself would still appear to suddenly disappear. It does not successfully create the impression in the viewer's mind that the form continues to exist - the brain simply isn't given enough to fill the rest in on its own.

Implicit markmaking takes an entirely different approach - instead of drawing the textural forms themselves (which is what you're doing by outlining them), we draw the shadows those forms cast on the surfaces around them - or in other words, we draw the impact the form has on its surroundings, and allow the viewer's brain to work backwards from them. When a form casts a shadow by blocking light from reaching another surface, it's the shape of that shadow - the specific way in which it's designed - that establishes how the form casting it and the surface receiving it exist in 3D space. As such, it becomes very useful for providing the viewer with 3D information.

The other major benefit to it is that when working with explicit markmaking, the more details we need to get across, the more visually dense and busy that area of your drawing will become, causing it to pull more of the viewer's attention and create focal points where you may not wish them to exist. Working implicitly allows us to have much more control over how much detail/contrast we're actually adding, by deciding how a textured area relates back to the light source. If the light source is closer to it, it'll cause all those cast shadows to become very small, even eliminate them altogether, creating an area that is clean and blank. Or, if the light source is very far away from it, all those cast shadows will be very long and large, so much so that they merge into one another creating solid areas of black. Despite being on opposite ends of the spectrum of light/dark, these are equal in how much contrast they produce.

Or, if we want to be able to create more visual interest, we can treat our shadows as though they're being cast from a light that is in a more middle-distance, not too close, not too far away, allowing those cast shadows to exist at a size that allows them to be perceived individually, without having them all be blasted away or merge together in some large, complex, compound shape.

This all relies on the relationship between the textural form and the light source itself, 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.

Now, for our purposes throughout this course we don't actually need to care that much about where the light source for the entirety of a drawing is - that's a requirement that may exist depending on what it is you're doing, but all the drawing we do throughout this course is more about conveying information to the viewer. What we do here is we use the fact that the lighting could result in certain shadows being larger, and other shadows being smaller, to back up our decisions of where we want areas of high contrast (lots of medium sized shadows) and where we want areas of low contrast (all the shadows get so big they merge together, or the shadows are so small most of them can't be seen at all).

This informal demo may help to look at this concept in practice. It refers to texture analysis exercise and explains how it is we think when we tackle it:

• First in the traceover of the reference image, we're identifying the kinds of forms that are present and how they vary/how they're similar.

• Then in the first rectangle labeled "the forms we're transferring" this is more of an idea of how we would, in our heads, think about arranging those textural forms on our surface based on what we saw in the reference. Generally when approaching this step yourself, you were drawing those outlines directly on the page, but here you will have to do your best to keep that information in your head. You don't need to be able to think about all the forms - just one at a time, plus the surfaces it'll cast shadows upon, as discussed further in the next point.

• Next in the rectangle labeled "how we're thinking about the cast shadows" are the actual lines we'd be drawing to design those cast shadow shapes, based on our understanding of the relationship between each textural form and the surfaces around it. The forms from the previous step are faded out here, because again - they weren't drawn. This is definitely the most challenging part, because working implicitly requires us to think about multiple forms simultaneously without drawing them - though not all at once, more a small handful including the one whose shadow you wish to design, and those whose surfaces that shadow might touch.

• And finally, we'd fill in those shadow shapes.

This leaves us with one critical point, which based on your work you may not have been keeping in mind. As explained here in Lesson 2, always approach every mark you make when drawing using implicit markmaking (so in this exercise, in the gradient portion specifically) in this 3 step process:

• First we observe our reference image to identify the kinds of forms that should be present, and how they might be arranged - we're not copying this information, we're identifying it.

• Next, we understand how the form will sit in space, how it'll be arranged, etc. in our actual drawing. Like I said - we're not copying what's in the reference image. The reference image is a source of information, but how we leverage that information is for us to decide.

• Finally, we transfer the form to our texture (in our minds), and specifically thinking about how this form is going to relate to the forms around it, design a shadow shape to convey this spatial relationship. Lastly, we fill it in.

Everything you draw with the intent to imply something must be introduced as a shape like this - no individual lines, no outlining the textural forms themselves, etc. Designing the shape forces us to think about the relationship between the different three dimensional elements at play. Even those textures that would end up with a lot of solid black would not simply be drawn as one big shadow shape - instead, each individual shadow shape would be drawn one at a time, and as a result of them all being so large and overlapping one another, they'd gradually fill up a large space.

So, looking at the leaf analysis on this page, you'd be relying on the actual tube structures of the veins to cast individual shadows, instead of predeterimining that you're going to have a lot of black in a certain area, and filling it in ahead of time. The veins of leaves can be quite tricky, but Lesson 3's leaf exercise material has an example for this. Generally I find it most effective to focus on the shadows cast in the areas where the veins branch out from one another, and avoid having those shadow shapes run along the long straight-aways.

For the scales on the same page, this example I alluded to earlier helps explain how we can similarly focus on the shadows cast where the different forms meet, because that's where they'll get "trapped" the most. As the light source gets closer, those shadows that don't get trapped in crevasses or small gaps would be burned away pretty quickly.

Now this is getting quite long (although understandably so, as I'm trying to go over a lot of the different considerations that come into play as implicit markmaking is applied to different scenarios), but I have just one last thing to call to your attention. When it comes to those textures 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.

Anyway, I hope that helps! While there's a lot of advice I've provided here, I'm still going to be marking this challenge as complete. Texture is an especially tricky area to understand when it comes to the larger story of 3D spatial reasoning, so I fully expect students to continue to struggle with it. My intent with the challenge is to give students a lot of time and mileage with the problem, so that when we come back for further feedback, what I share with you here can be understood alongside the understanding you've already developed.