Despite the limited ellipse guide, I am admittedly glad that you didn't continue trying to freehand your wheels. I know it's kind of discouraging, but freehanding ellipses is extremely difficult, and those like Scott Robertson who can whip one off and have it fall in precisely where they need it can do so thanks to years and years of practice. For students at this stage, freehanding the ellipses is more likely to severely undermine the exercise as a whole.
Jumping in with the structural aspect of your wheels, by and large you've handled these well. You've leveraged your different ellipses to help construct wheels while controlling their profile - with some like 7 and 8 being pretty straight across, which gives the impression that they're made of very thick rubber and would land, if dropped, with a heavy thud, and others like 13 which convey through their more rounded, arcing profile, a sense of being more "inflated" and bouncy. That said, one thing that would help increase this control further is to include a central ellipse - you usually relied on bridging the side ellipses across to create the profile you wanted, but having a central ellipse where you can make it larger, will help further push this sense of the tire being bouncy and inflated.
When it comes to the spokes/rims, you're generally handling these well, but I would advise you to limit the portions you fill with black to cast shadows only - you tend to use it more arbitrarily, sometimes for form shading (where a side plane is made black), or other similar things. Keeping our visual elements more singular in the purpose they're meant to achieve (like saying that all the filled shapes are always going to be cast shadows) helps the viewer understand what they're looking at that much more efficiently, with every little bit of friction giving them an extra millisecond pause to think undermining that clarity.
Taking that opportunity to segue into the textural aspect of the challenge, this is where the challenge becomes something of an intentional trap. Being as far removed from Lesson 2 as we are, it's very common for students to largely forget about specifically how, in this course, we're meant to tackle textural problems. Students tend to fall into one of three groups (in truth, one of two groups, because the third are those rare students who actually go back and review that material so they can correctly tackle their textures):
Those who vaguely do remember that we convey texture through some use of filled areas of solid black
Those who've forgotten all of that and largely try to draw the wheels in a purely observational fashion.
You appear to fall into the first category, and I can see that you did try different ways of using those visual tools to convey your textures.
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 with tons of explicit markmaking can certainly 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.
When we try and achieve the result of implicit markmaking (not having to draw in every last detail, and instead picking certain parts to convey) we can easily end up putting marks down randomly. In truth, that's likely what one would do when actually drawing their own stuff outside of this course (unless they specifically wanted a very detailed and accurate depiction of a tire) - that is, rely on their instincts and just put some marks down - but what we're doing here is developing your instincts so that the marks you're likely to choose are that much... well, for lack of a better word... better. Students often get frustrated because implying texture in that manner that can seem sloppy and rushed, but still manages to convey the information effectively can seem like magic. But of course, it's not. It's just a matter of understanding how the marks we put down on the page are the result of the relationships between the forms that sit in space.
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 essentially means - even if we set aside the importance of maintaining a consistent light source and worrying about where that light source is - that within this way of thinking about the forms that are present, and the marks we'd make in order to represent them, the exact same form can ostensibly cast a different shadow, and therefore result in a different mark on the page, despite being the exact same. All because its relationship with the light source is different.
This imbues our seemingly random decisions on where to make marks, and where to leave them out, with a logical basis. It's just something that is very tedious and time consuming to tackle at first, because it requires us to think about each individual textural form, without ever first drawing them on the page.
When it comes to those tires with shallow grooves, or really any texture 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.
Because this challenge exists as an intentional trap, I don't generally assign revisions for it. Rather, it serves to remind students that there may be material that they might want to review before continuing forwards - and that if it's possible that they've forgotten to incorporate the texture material into their warmups, it's possible there may be other things that could have slipped through the cracks, and so some reflection may be in order to identify any other lapses so those topics can be reviewed as well.
So, I'll leave you to that, and will go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Once you've reviewed anything that might require it, feel free to move onto Lesson 7.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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