Just as a reminder, when working on the homework you'll be submitting, it's important that you don't alter how you approach them according to your own external desires or goals, especially where it contradicts our specific recommendations. Doing so will simply put more obstacles in the way of what the challenge or lesson is designed to focus on, which can make it less effective and can also potentially interfere with how easily the work can be critiqued. Ultimately I'm glad to see that you mainly stuck with your ellipse guide, but please be sure to keep this in mind going forward.
Starting with the structural aspect of the challenge, you're leveraging the various ellipses to good effect when building out the body of your wheels, which allows you to control whether the profile of each wheel is more rigid and straight, or by way of increasing the size of the midsection, whether it is more rounded, giving the impression that the tire is inflated and would land with a bounce rather than a heavy thud.
When it comes to the spokes of the wheels' rims, here you do run into a few issues at times that result in some inconsistency to the structure you're building out. As shown here, the side planes of each of those spokes have a front edge (which sits level with the spokes' outer faces) and a back edge (which is recessed, and connects to the inner tube of the wheel further back). You tend to draw that back edge just as long as the front edge, as though you're aiming to have it connect to the front edge of the inner tube. I also noticed that you did at times forget to close off that structure. Being mindful of how these structures sit in 3D space, and how they relate to the parts they connect to (so we can have them connect in the correct locations) is quite important when it comes to making something look believably 3D.
There were also many other cases further into the set where you approached the complex rim structures in a manner that skipped a lot of significant constructional steps, as we see here. Remember - even if the problem you've chosen to tackle is complex, you should still be adhering to the core tenets we espouse throughout this course - and the one of always building up from simple to complex is a significant one.
Continuing onto the textural aspect of the challenge, here it seems like you may have forgotten about the concepts discussed in Lesson 2, in regards to how we tackle texture in this course with a focus on implicit markmaking and the use of cast shadows to imply the presence of those textural forms. That is admittedly not abnormal - this challenge serves in large part as a trap. Being as far removed from Lesson 2 as we are, it is pretty common that students, to varying degrees, forget about the texture material. Some remember that we want to work with intentionally designed filled black shapes, but don't necessarily use them for cast shadows, and others like yourself just focus on drawing what they see directly.
When it comes to texture specifically - at least, how we handle it here, which is very specific to this course and what it seeks to develop in our students - we are ultimately looking at the same kind of problem that the course as a whole explores: spatial reasoning. We imply the marks we draw (you can refer to the implicit vs explicit markmaking section for more specific information on this) by drawing the shadows our textural forms cast on their surroundings, not by drawing the forms themselves (in terms of outlining them, or otherwise drawing anything about the form itself). It's the shape of the shadow itself, which is designed based on our understanding of the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it and the surface receiving it. And so, as stressed in these reminders, in this course we're never just drawing what we see. We're looking at our references, and understanding what they tell us about the forms in question, and then deciding on how to convey the relationships between them in space.
The reason we use implicit markmaking instead of explicit is fairly simple, although it's not always obvious. A wheel drawn purely from observation might look excellent floating in the void, all full of detail. But when it becomes part of an existing drawing, all of that packed detail can actually work against you by drawing the viewer's eye to it whether you want it to or not. This interferes with our ability to control composition (which is all about dictating how the viewer experiences a piece, what they look at and in which order), which while outside of the scope of this course, is still something I want to give students the tools to engage with more easily.
Explicit markmaking basically locks us into an agreement with the viewer: whatever is drawn is present, and whatever has not been drawn, is not present. And therefore to convey each textural form, we have to declare its presence explicitly. Implicit markmaking on the other hand gives us more freedom by disconnecting the marks we draw from the specifics of what is present.
As this was an intentional trap, I don't generally assign revisions on that basis - but rather use it as a way to more poignantly remind students that they may want to reflect on what material they may have allowed to slip through the cracks, so they can go back and review them prior to finishing up the rest of the course. In your case, you'll certainly want to review the concepts relating to texture (the reminders I linked above would be a good place to start), but you'll also want to consider whether there might be anything else that may not have come up in your warmups in a while.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto Lesson 7.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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