Jumping right in, I'm really, really pleased with just how boldly you've been working with filled areas of solid black. While you don't stick to these all of the time (there are still some individual lines drawn that haven't first been outlined as shapes, then filled in), you definitely adhere to this more than most, and it reflects in how intentionally designed many of your shadow shapes tend to be.

While you're doing quite well, I do have some points of advice to offer you to help ensure that you continue getting the most out of this exercise.

In particular, I found that your jackfruit texture was a very interesting case study, as it features a few issues that arise more from the kind of problems it exposes you to. I've made some notes directly on the page here:

• Across the top, I talk briefly about how approaching our marks with that two step process of outlining the shapes, then filling them in, is so very critical. As I mentioned above, you do this for the most part, but I wanted to take the opportunity to illustrate why it's so important. It forces us to think about the forms that are present, and how they relate to one another. This can help us consider how, given that the individual "cells" of the jackfruit are kind of pyramidal, the actual borders between them are buried far deeper than we'd actually be able to see - well before that point, those valleys would get filled with shadow. This leaves us with, instead of a line, a more complex shadow shape, because as shown here those shaded in triangles between each structure will give us a more complex visual result when seen from the top. This kind of shape, and the tapering nature of each of the three "arms" also leans in much better to allowing the borders between the textural structures to "disappear" more naturally, whereas the way you'd drawn it as lines kind of requires us to choose some arbitrary point at which they just stop showing up.

• The smaller notes just above the ones across the top talk about how you're casting shadows in two separate directions, both to the left and the right. Remember that as shown in this diagram, our shadows are being cast from a light source on the far right, resulting in them being cast to the left.

• And lastly, along the bottom, I demonstrate why the raised, pyramidal structures that make up each textural form means that the shadows they cast aren't limited to being trapped inside of each individual "cell". The way you've approached drawing them corresponds more to them being flat, with shallow grooves - there's nothing to really spill over in that circumstance, which would definitely give us some difficulties when it comes to getting the far left end of our texture to blend more seamlessly into the solid black bar there. In this case however, we actually are better off - since the structures are raised, they'll absolutely cast shadows across their individual boundaries, allowing us to have the shadows pile upon one another the further to the left we go.

Your pinecone texture would also benefit considerably from this third point - the plates of pinecones actually layer upon one another, and so depending on how we arrange the textural forms in the gradient, we can put ourselves in a situation to better take advantage of this.

Now before I mark this challenge as complete, there's one last thing I wanted to share with you. It's a prewritten analysis of how I've approached a texture that is pulled not from photos that really lend themselves to the kind of textural studies we're used to, but rather one that forces us to consider the forms that are present and how they can be arranged to suit our purposes. I think this aligns pretty well with what I've explained above, so hopefully it can serve to further drive home the point that we are in a fair bit of control over how we use the information present in our textural references.

Here's the demo and below is an explanation of each step:

• 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.

• 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.

• Once the shadow shapes are in, while we can't take away from them (since we're working in ink), we can add to them to extend our cast shadows as needed to adjust and push the gradient.

Now all told, I think you already do understand much of this. You have many textures that have come out really well (the basket weave, the elephant skin, the stroop waffel which was particularly tricky, and the ice cream which was beautifully done - all of these come to mind as examples of these concepts being leveraged very well). I think the main thing to keep in mind going forward is that you can arrange those textural forms to make your work easier, just as you can to make them harder - but it isn't necessarily beneficial to do the latter, since that can distract us from the main considerations the exercise pushes us towards.

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