6:54 PM, Friday September 9th 2022
In all honesty it would definitely have been preferable had you stuck with the ellipse guide throughout the entirety of the set. We try to encourage students to use them because at this point, students simply haven't had the mileage with ellipses throughout the course to be able to avoid having them interfere with the main focus of the challenge. So, while master ellipse templates do indeed result in smaller ellipses, they also allow us to focus our attention on what this challenge tries to address, rather than getting mired in ellipses, for which we have many other exercises. We do permit students to freehand them, but this is really more in the case that one is not at all able to get their hands on one.
It is worth mentioning however that in the way you've approached freehanding those later wheels, you have ended up straying from a number of important elements of the course. There's a lot more chicken scratching, which as explained here should not be permitted - even if it means making marks that are not accurate. So when you say things got sketchy, it's more than just a mild oversight. Additionally, you're also frequently trying to approach them by drawing more faintly first, then going back over those lines - effectively starting with a rough sketch and then doing a clean-up pass. This is not an approach that should be used in this course, as noted here, and as reiterated in this section of Lesson 6.
While freehanding is permitted, unfortunately the way in which you've done it here is too far outside of the bounds of this course's specific rules that I am going to have to ask you to redo the wheels from 12 to 25. For these, you should go back to using your ellipse guide.
Before I leave you to that, I did notice one issue in the first 11 that I wanted to quickly address so you wouldn't end up repeating it into the next steep. In a lot of these, you appear to be drawing the farthest end of the wheel with an ellipse with a much wider degree than the rest. This sudden and dramatic shift is too extreme, and causes the wheel to look rather significantly out of place. If you found yourself forced to pick that as the only ellipse you had that was wider than the previous one, then I would recommend in such circumstances simply using the same (narrower) degree, as this will be closer to correct than the considerable jump.
Next Steps:
Please redo the wheels from 11 to 25, using your ellipse guide.
I will give you a full critique when those are completed.