I can't express how pleased I am to see when students actually take the instructions to heart - for example, how you spread the work on the texture challenge out over such a massive period of time. It's completely understandable that students might be a bit hesitant to do so, especially because it kind of commits you to spending a pretty significant amount of time on this course as a whole, but looking at your results, it was well worth it.

Your progress as a whole is palpable. You were certainly headed in the right direction from the beginning, but on your first page there it was clear that you were still struggling to understand how to separate textures into cast shadows - your very first attempt, with the leaf texture for instance focused heavily on outlines, and failed to properly capture a sort of seamless transition from one side to the next. That said, I can see that your gears were turning, and that you were wrestling with the concepts, trying to think about how to give the implication that a form was present, without drawing it directly. With this giant, vein made entirely of negative space down the center of the gradient, it's clear you were thinking about the right things.

From the beginning, I'd argue that the direct texture studies on the far left were demonstrating really strong observational skills. Where beginners traditionally end up oversimplifying things a great deal, you were well past that already. Instead, while you were capturing things in a manner that appears accurate, what you were steadily improving on was deciding what should be captured, and what should be left alone. Your brain was working through how to sort through the information, to learn to focus on what would have the greatest impact, and what would allow you to focus on capturing the soul of a texture.

The reason this is necessary is because our eyes do a lot of that processing for us, when we look at something in the real world. What you're learning here is to play the role of the viewer's eyes, choosing what is of most importance, and what should be set aside to avoid overburdening them with information.

Interestingly enough, I did see that from 1 to 15, you ended up forgetting the purpose of the solid black bar along the far left side of the gradient (even though you were still progressing nicely across the rest). This is an issue that comes up in 18 as well, so even though you handle it far better in other cases, it's worth discussing.

The black bar (and technically, the white bar on the opposite side) exist to provide the student with extremes defined, and the transition between them to fill in. The goal is that the edges of these bars should not be identifiable - instead, we want to achieve a smooth transition, going from full black with complete textural density to full white, where the texture gets so sparse it vanishes. Achieving this with no clear border or jump, can be tricky. Once achieved, we then start looking at how that transition is spread across the gradient, and whether it's evenly balanced.

For example, even as far as 23 and 24, while you achieved that smoother transition, most of the density was concentrated towards the far left. I'm not too worried about this sort of thing, though - it happens as much because we'd rather not spend a year working on a single gradient, while bankrupting ourselves in ink costs - but all the same, it's something to consider and you achieved far greater overall balance with cases like 25.

The last thing I wanted to mention isn't a criticism - with the wood bark in 22, I found this to be a particularly intriguing texture, simply because you were faced with the challenge of multiple "levels" of textural information. You've got the major pieces of bark which cast significantly larger shadows, and then the texture of those bark pieces themselves, getting into some of the smaller bumps and ridges. I think you handled this really well, creating a staggered transition, but maintaining an overall sense of consistency as you moved from sparse to dense.

All in all, you've done a fantastic job throughout this challenge, and all that despite the fact that the texture material in Drawabox still has a lot of room for improvement. I'm hoping that once I can get back on my overhaul (it had to be paused, as flooding in my apartment caused me to be temporarily displaced and my equipment put into storage), I can do a better job of explaining it. I am glad, however, that you were able to use what was available, in combination with your own considerable efforts, to yield such solid results.

Keep up the great work, and consider this difficult challenge complete!