Hello TotalTempest, hope you’re well.

Looking through your textures, I can see you put a lot of work into them, and have shown some improvements across the set. You’re doing well, but I have a few points to talk about that might help you improve further.

You’ve mostly done a great job of working with solid black and white, avoiding any use of hatching or scribbling to create halftones. The only notable exception to this is 23- chrome. That’s a very difficult texture to choose for this exercise, as it’s so smooth we don’t really have any cast shadows to work with. I can’t really fault you for trying it though, as it’s featured as an example in the dissections exercise.

The second point I wanted to talk about is to always remember that we're always working with the shadows these textural forms cast, not their outlines. There are some cases where you’ve done a really good job at working implicitly, using shadow shapes, such as 24, 18 and 25. There are others where you’re relying on outlining forms explicitly, such as 3, 4, 12, 15, 16, 17. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, give this section another read https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/2/implicitexplicit and check out this demo from Comfy https://imgur.com/tJIFFQA When we work implicitly, which involves drawing the shadows those forms would cast, we can increase or reduce how much black is being added to the page without changing the nature of the texture being conveyed. We can see this in action on this example of bush viper scales. https://i.imgur.com/qWwH4tc.png

On a related note, when your shadows get thinner, you often describe them with a single line, instead of a shape. If you look at this demo https://imgur.com/oAx2pRD hopefully you’ll be able to see that you can achieve a much more dynamic and nuanced effect by drawing your shadows as shapes instead of lines, even when they get very thin.

When you’re designing your shadow shapes for the gradient, and transitioning between dense and sparse, it may help to think about changing the location of the light source. So for the right side of your gradient, think about it being high noon, with the sun overhead and the shadows being short, and on the left where you want your gradient darker, imagine you’re seeing the textural forms at dawn or dusk, when the sun is low and the shadows are long, here’s a diagram of what I mean: https://imgur.com/2Oo6qIb

For example on your strawberry, you do have a more black on the left, and less on the right, but you’ve used the same shadow shape repeated across the gradient, so in my opinion it looks like the pattern is smaller or further away on the right, instead of being blasted by more light.

For textures with holes, such as 2, 4 7(?), 14, this demo may be helpful https://imgur.com/SCnATRK 14 shows a marked improvement, as you avoided outlining the holes, and were thinking about changing the shape of the shadow to transition your gradient, instead of just drawing the same shapes smaller.

The last point I wanted to talk about was the black bar on the left. I think that you’re aware that we’re aiming to have the bar transition seamlessly into the dark side of the gradient as shown in the demo image https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/04b5c612.jpg and have done it quite well in 22, 13, 15 and 7. But it’s something you’re still struggling with at the end of the challenge in 24 and 25 (and many others throughout the challenge) There are also some cases where you’re ignoring the white bar on the right of the gradient (22, 20 15) I think if you can address the points I made earlier in the critique about working implicitly, and designing your shadow shapes based on how light is hitting the textural forms then you will have a much easier job making the transition from dense to sparse and integrating the black and white bars into your gradients.

Alrighty, I think I’ve gone on long enough. You’ve got plenty to think about there, but I think you’re showing a strong enough understanding of the exercise to continue on your own so I’m going to mark this challenge as complete, Congratulations!

If you have any questions, or if you feel like doing an additional page and getting further feedback on it, feel free to reply here, or ping me on Discord (I’m DIO)

Well done, and keep up the good work!