So to start, I want to stress something that can easily, when in the midst of providing critique, be lost amongst the noise. And that is a simple fact: you put a ton of effort into completing this challenge, and you've done a lot of work developing your observational skills, studying your reference images, and so forth.

The thing is, our texture analysis exercise is very specific in what it focuses on, in what it tries to push students to pay attention to, and ultimately the understanding it is meant to develop - and in a lot of ways, you've unfortunately missed that. Not to say you haven't gained a lot from this challenge, and not to say that I won't still be marking the challenge as complete. But I do need to take a moment to reexplain exactly what this exercise focuses on, so you can review the provided material for it, and apply it more effectively towards its particular goals on your own.

So, what the texture analysis exercise focuses on is the concept of "implicit markmaking" that we introduce in Lesson 2. Specifically, the idea of not drawing the textural forms themselves that are present, but as outlined in these reminders, identifying the forms shown in our reference image, understanding how they sit in space and how they relate to the surfaces around them, and designing the shape of the shadow they would cast. We apply this process one by one to each textural form whose presence we wish to imply - without drawing the textural form itself at any point. This is not easy to do, especially when it comes to drawing the shadow a form casts without first defining the form on the page, and that tends to make it a very time consuming exercise.

So what set your work here apart from what the exercise actually asked for was that you seem to have mostly invested your time in observing your references (which you did a very good job of - you captured a lot of very nuanced elements from each one), and in applying them more graphically to create a gradient. By graphically, I mean that you took visual elements from the reference as you understood them in 2D, and then applying them to your 2D gradient. It skips the step that grounds the exercise in the spatial reasoning the course as a whole seeks to develop.

To illustrate the thought process that drives this exercise, this diagram may help. Below is a breakdown of the thinking behind each step.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Once the shadow shapes are in, while we can't take away from them (since we're working in ink), we can add to them to extend our cast shadows as needed to adjust and push the gradient.

One of the critical issues with applying explicit markmaking to our textures (so basically any situation where we're drawing the textural forms directly - whether it's by outlining/constructing them as we would draw our normal objects, or using our filled areas of solid black to capture form shading, rather than cast shadows - is that it essentially locks us into a contract with the viewer, saying that "everything I draw on this page, I'm telling you is present in the world I'm depicting, and anything I don't draw, isn't". This makes cases where we want to tone down the detail density on a part of our drawing tricky, because it doesn't allow us to say that the texture continues to extend into the areas where we haven't drawn it. Implicit markmaking does not suffer from such limitations.

The reason is entirely rooted in the fact that implicit markmaking relies on cast shadows. 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 the same textural form in one spot may cast a larger or smaller shadow than the same form in a different spot - allowing us to define the texture in one area, and let it kind of "fade away", and leaving the viewer's brain to fill in and understand that the texture continues even where we haven't filled everything in. This allows us a lot more control when it comes to things like composition and design, which are outside of the scope of this course - but we still want to arm students with what they need when they get to those concepts.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that there are a lot of textures you've chosen here that fall into a category involving 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.

So, as promised, I'll be marking the challenge as complete in acknowledgement of the development of your observational skills, but I believe in order to make full use of this exercise going forward, in addition to going through what I've written above, you'll want to:

• Review all of the instructions for the texture analysis exercise including the video and the written notes

• Review the material in the texture section of lesson 2 (especially the concepts for form shading and below that point), and these reminders in particular.

These concepts do come up again, briefly, later in the course with the 25 wheel challenge, so we can revisit it at that point. In that challenge it's actually very normal for students to continue to try and apply explicit markmaking to the texture of their tires, but they also don't generally work on the texture challenge, since it's optional.