Sorry for the wait - Mushroom's temporarily away, but I figured I'd step in and answer your questions.

In regards to your first question, when drawing along with the demos, it is best to follow it directly, rather than trying to interpret it more loosely against a different reference image, so that you can put yourself in our shoes so to speak, and better understand why we're making the choices we are in those demos. That said, students aren't required to draw along with the demos (we do recommend it of course), so it's fine to do studies of different photos of the same plants, I just wouldn't recommend mixing the two as you did here. It's not inherently wrong or against the instructions, but it does reduce how effectively you'd be internalizing the demonstration compared to following with the demo and its reference, and then applying what you learned to the constructions based on entirely different reference images.

For your second question, I'll be completely honest - I totally forgot that demo was there. This course has evolved over the years in regards to how we tackle texture, starting from where Peter Han's Dynamic Sketching course really just regarded it was a visual pattern to create an effect, and gradually shifting more and more to thinking of texture as just a different manifestation of the 3D spatial relationships we deal with through the rest of the course.

As we work through our overhaul (Lesson 2 is what we're looking at right now, trying to figure out how to apply all that we've learned from providing students official critique, and all that we've conveyed through that feedback), this is an issue that is steadily being resolved - but right now it does mean that some of these demos are less relevant. For right now, the texture analysis demo material, which focuses heavily on cast shadows, is the most "current" and "accurate" explanation of texture we've got, where it's all about focusing on the concrete relationships between the textural forms and the surfaces around them, which are defined by the shapes of our shadows.

In step 3 of the "fun with texture" demo, that's not really what we're doing - rather, it's more that it's leaning into shading, which based on our current approach is not correct. So, I'm going to go ahead and remove that demo to avoid confusion.

Instead, I'll give you these:

First, 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 gives us the logical grounds to say that despite two forms being identical, they don't have to cast identical shadows - and therefore we can control where we want shadows to be longer or shorter, without changing the nature of the texture being conveyed.

Next, building off that premise, this diagram refers to the Lesson 2 texture analysis exercise and explains how it is we think when we tackle it:

• 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.

At its core, this is how we can think about texture in any of our constructions - it's about acknowledging texture as being made up of small forms, which cast shadows which can join together to create larger and more complex shadow shapes, or which can be so small as to not be seen.

That gives us tools that we can use to convey the nature of the surface's texture to the viewer. Keep in mind it's never about reproducing our reference perfectly - it's about having something concrete that we wish to convey or communicate to the viewer, and then using the reference and all of the forms it displays as tools to help convey that.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. Don't worry if texture doesn't really sink in for a good while - we'll have updated the texture section of Lesson 2 (mostly to convey what I said above, but also to present it with exercises further help in applying those concepts) well before you're finished with the course as a whole, and ultimately it still is going to depend heavily on the overall spatial reasoning skills the rest of the course material focuses on. In other words, don't let it hold you up too much right now, as it's expected to still be rather perplexing at this stage.

When you do have your revisions ready, be sure to respond to the original critique, so Mushroom gets notified.