My ellipse guide is fairly small but I tried my best with what I had. Varying the degrees by 25, 35, 45, and 60 degrees, which was all the ellipses on my guide. Wanted to make sure I tried to do at least one wheel with all of the possible degrees.
Starting with the structural aspect of your wheels, you've done quite well. You've made excellent use of your ellipse guides - limited as they were - to go beyond simply laying down a basic cylinder and instead flesh out the structure to create a subtler arcing profile that helps to convey how the tire itself is inflated, and would land with a bounce rather than a solid thunk. You've also generally done a good job minding not only the outward faces of your spokes/rims (which tends to flatten them out), but also fleshed out the side planes of those structures, helping them to feel fully solid and concrete.
One thing I did notice however was that you certainly struggled with executing a lot of the tight linework that was required to establish some of the internal structures of your wheels, and often did end up with somewhat scratchy linework made up of many smaller strokes layered atop one another. I completely understand why - drawing in such tight, small spaces can be difficult. Just be sure to always adhere to the principles of one stroke per mark, as scratchy linework can result in forms that feel less solid. For every mark, consider what your intent for that line is, and how you can best go about to execute it, and resist the temptation to just get marks down one way or another. This is no doubt time consuming, but that's pretty much par for the course here.
Continuing onto the textural aspect of this challenge, I must admit that it is intended as something of a trap. Being as far removed as we are from Lesson 2, it's not at all uncommon for students to approach the kinds of "details" we deal with in our tire treads in a sort of decorative fashion - that is, not with the intent to convey any specific information, but rather to go after a purely visual impression. This leads us to drawing more directly from observation, without the critical step of understanding the nature of the textural forms depicted within that reference, which I go into in more detail here. This inevitably leads to a lot more explicit markmaking - you see a thing, you draw the thing - and avoids the significant advantages of conveying texture by implying the presence of those forms using the shadows they cast.
Now, the wheels you've drawn here are lovely - floating in isolation, they all look pleasantly complex with a lot of interest. But, if we were to use these in larger vehicle constructions, many of them will have enough visual information all packed together to draw the viewer's attention, creating a focal point there whether you mean to or not. This can severely impact our ability to compose our shots, and guide the viewer's eye around ourselves.
Conversely, working implicitly as demonstrated here with this example of an african bush viper's scales, allows us to adjust the manner in which the information is conveyed (that is, how much ink is used, how concentrated our use of ink ends up being in a given area of the drawing) without changing the nature of what's being conveyed. We can have deep, broad, expansive cast shadows, very minimal ones, and the textural forms being conveyed as being present does not change.
Fortunately as this is largely intentional (that is, the laying of the trap), I do not hold students back over this. Rather, I treat it as a rude reminder that one may want to review the Lesson 2 texture material and refresh their recollection, rather than steamrolling forwards. But, before I mark this challenge as complete, I did want to provide a little extra information.
This diagram conveys how to think about textures that are composed of grooves or holes. We can often feel that the thing we actually talk about, to which we ascribe nouns (holes, grooves, etc) are inevitably the "textural form" in question, but of course this is not the case. Holes and grooves are an absence of space, and the forms in question are the walls that surround them, which cast shadows upon one another and onto the floor at the base of the hole.
This diagram (and this one which is the same thing but slightly different, in case that speaks more clearly to some students) illustrates, more in relation to the texture analysis exercise, how the cast shadows actually work. This diagram demonstrates a similar idea, but more directly being applied to the texture analysis.
So. As promised, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Just be sure to take some time to review the textural concepts before continuing forward.
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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