As a whole, your work on this challenge has come along pretty well. I do have a few points to offer to help you continue in the right direction, but before I get to all of that, I did want to point out that this challenge is one that most students don't submit until much farther in the course. Texture is ultimately all about the relationships between textural forms and the surfaces around them (as defined in the cast shadow shapes we design based on our understanding of those spatial relationships), and so our ability to execute them improves as we progress through the course. Specifically, it's the constructional drawing exercises from lessons 3-7 (where we're actually drawing real things, which forces us to think about how to break them into simple forms and how those forms relate to one another in space), and so what we learn there tends to feed back into the work we do here. Presenting the exercise first in Lesson 2, similarly to how we introduce the form intersections, serves as a sort of compass or direction for the student, as they get into the later material. I just wanted to give you that context, as to why not every aspect of this exercise necessarily clicked.

Anyway, onto the actionable stuff. When it comes to texture - since we are working purely by capturing the cast shadows our textural forms project onto their surrounding surfaces - is that there are a number of cases where you try and draw those shadows as individual lines. While this comes up in many of your textures to varying degrees, the strongest examples of this are with your dragon scales and roofing tiles. Here it seems that you start out by outlining the tiles/scales directly - that is, outlining the forms themselves, not the shadow shapes they cast - and this leaves you in a tricky position when you get to the far right, where you have to somehow transition from them into an area of pure white. You end up trying to allow the lines to break up into dotted/dashed structures, but this breaks further from the idea of conveying the presence of these forms through the shadows they cast.

We actually do talk about this in the lesson material for the texture analysis exercise, specifically in regards to this point. Towards the bottom half of the diagram, I talk about creating those lost-and-found edges when our texture starts to get sparse in detail by focusing on the areas where forms meet, as these are the deeper areas where shadows will get trapped.

The use of cast shadows when conveying texture is very important, because it gives us the tools we need to be able to transition from areas of high detail to those areas with sparse or no detail at all, without a sudden jump from one to the other. 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. This means that if we're thinking in terms of cast shadows, to imply the textural forms rather than explicitly declare them to be present with outlines, those shadows can be drawn very differently without changing what is actually being conveyed to the viewer. If you put a light source really close to a scaley surface, that light will blast away the shadows from everywhere but the deepest cracks where those scales meet. Conversely, if the light source is so far away, all of the shadows being cast will be so broad and expansive that they'll merge together into a single large shadow, similarly eliminating detail. But if the light source is somewhere in between, where you get cast shadows that are substantial but not large enough to merge into one, that's where you get a lot of detail. And these kinds of areas can exist along a single surface, because one area of that surface is going to be a different distance from that light source than another, resulting in different kinds of shadows.

A lot of this does however require us to remember that we're not simply drawing what we see in our reference image. We are, as explained in these reminders from lesson 2, observing our reference to understand it and to identify the forms that are present, and then using that understanding to design our own cast shadow shapes. That intention of designing the shadow shapes ins integral, and it's why we stress (as also mentioned in those reminders) why the lines we draw when conveying texture are the outlines of the shadow shape, not the outlines of the textural form itself. Once you outline a textural form, you're basically locking it in, and as you discovered, it is very difficult to transition away from it to transition smoothly into the solid white bar on the far right of our textural gradient.

Of course, that's not to say any of that is easy - it requires us to hold our understanding of the textural form in question in our minds, so that we can draw the shadow it casts. That is very difficult, even when just focusing on individual forms, one at a time.

This diagram may help solidify some of what I've explained already, although it's still going to take a lot of mileage/experience in actually applying these concepts to really get it to sink in and feel like you actually "get" it. It explains how it is we think when we tackle the texture analysis exercise:

• 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. This is what we're thinking about when we're observing our reference.

• 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, when creating our gradient.

• 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.

Another relevant concern comes up with any texture consisting of holes, cracks, etc. I think your stick wall is a good example of this, since you focused more on the gaps between the sticks when deciding where to apply your areas of solid black. 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 give us a different result at the end of the day (for example, tires with really shallow grooves), 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.

So, the main takeaways here are:

• Don't draw your textures one stroke at a time. Think more in terms of drawing filled, solid black shapes, for everything - even the areas where you think you can get away with a simple stroke. Your brain will engage with those kinds of marks differently, and it's all about the hoops we're getting your brain to hop through, so as to rewire the way it thinks about these kinds of problems.

• Don't look for the shadows in your reference - we're not drawing what we see, we are looking, understanding, and then designing shadow shapes based on our understanding of the relationships between the forms that are present.

• Be careful of what it is you regard as being the the textural form in question, and be sure to differentiate between positive space and negative space in your 3D structure.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I'll be marking this challenge as complete, but do be sure to continue practicing this exercise going forward, and applying what I've explained here.