Looking over your work here, overall you're doing well. There are a few points that I can bring to your attention to ensure that you continue making the most effective use of this exercise, but as you progress through the set I can clearly see an increase in the amount of detail you're able to consider and capture, which shows a steady improvement of your observational skills and a better overall sense of how to organize that information.

The points I want to highlight are as follows:

• Ensuring that you're focusing on the shadows your textural forms cast, and not falling into the trap of applying form shading to those textural forms instead.

• Ensuring that the shadows are being cast in the correct direction, based on your light source.

• How to think about more complex textures that aren't necessarily made up of just one kind of textural form

I'll go into detail with each point individually.

Focusing on cast shadows rather than form shading

I can see from your work that you are aware of the heavy focus this course puts on cast shadows, especially when it comes to texture. To reiterate it however, the marks we utilize in this exercise - especially the longer texture gradient - are always cast shadows. They're not the outlines of the textural forms themselves, nor are the marks we draw shading applied to the sides of those forms. So in essence, our thought process falls to where the forms are arranged along the length of the surface, and where the shadows will be shorter due to the light hitting it at a steeper angle, and where the shadows will be longer due to the light hitting it at a shallower angle, as laid out in this diagram. As a result, the texture gradients are as though all of the form shading, outlines, colour, etc. have been removed, leaving only cast shadows.

There are definitely a lot of textures where you have focused on the cast shadows, but there are still a great many where you perhaps confuse what is a cast shadow, and what is more akin to form shading. For example, if we look at the brick wall on this page. Here you've filled in the side planes of the bricks with black. This is form shading because it involves the consideration of the orientation of the given surface relative to the light source. As something turns towards the light, it gets lighter in tone, as it turns away from the light, it gets darker - only you're working with solid black and white, so we lose the midtones, but in effect it's still the same consideration.

Cast shadows instead require us to design an entirely new shape (as opposed to filling one that already exists), and it is this shape, the specific design of it, which conveys the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it, in 3D space.

A simple way to avoid the confusion is to ask yourself if you're filling in an existing shape, or introducing a new one. If you're simply filling in a shape, you may need to consider it a bit harder - it's possible you're still working with a cast shadow (there are cases where spaces like holes will still get filled in - though I'm going to share some extra information on this with you at the end of my critique), but it's more likely that you're falling into form shading instead.

Another good example of this issue would be the lego bricks on this page. While the pebbles on the same page are not using form shading in the same way, you're still just filling spaces in rather than designing shadow shapes based on the spatial relationships present. There is some of that with the lego bricks too, where you're filling in the undersides. Ultimately I can understand what you're going for here - it's more about creating a graphic separation and conveying information believably, but that isn't the focus of the exercise. Don't worry if the cast shadows make certain parts of your texture less legible - in fact, by definition that's expected, since there will be parts of it that are completely plunged into darkness by the shadows cast over them.

The direction in which your shadows are cast

I'm actually not sure if this is an actual issue in your work, or if it's simply my misinterpretation of your work. Initially I was going to flag this for the swiss cheese texture on this page, as I hadn't yet read what the texture actually was. I realized later that what I believed to be bumps casting shadows downwards was actually holes casting upwards.

Now, I'm not sure if the Lunar Surface texture from this page is the same deal - I suspect it might be, so this whole section can probably be ignored. I'll leave it at a reminder of what you mentioned yourself in your submission comment - the light source is always placed at the end opposite of the big black bar, and shadows are cast away from that light source.

Thinking about more complex textures

So for this point, I was mainly focused on the circuit board on this page. All things considered, you handled this texture pretty well. It just doesn't look that great not because of how you did it, but because circuit boards are very particular in how things are laid out. It left you with fairly little control over how things are arranged to create a satisfying gradient, so the result looked kind of sparse - but again, that's not because you did it wrong. It's just because it wasn't that great of a texture for this kind of exercise.

When doing this exercise in the future, it definitely helps to stick to simpler textures where you have more control over how things are arranged - especially ones with more overall density. With any texture though - as you likely well know, based on your work - we want to look at just how much we can play with the arrangements of the forms. For example, some textures may have textural forms that are arranged in clusters, or they might have textural forms that are spread out evenly across the surface - but in those cases, we can play with just how many of them there are. As long as they match the arrangement pattern from the reference, it'll still read correctly.

One last thing

So I mentioned earlier that I'd share a little extra information in regards to cases where a cast shadow can end up filling in an existing space. This is the sort of thing you'll see more often with textures involving grooves, holes, or cracks - basically anything where the name of the texture refers not to an actual textural form, but rather to an absence of form, a negative space.

As shown in this diagram, in such cases the textural forms are actually the walls that surround these empty spaces - and so they can cast shadows onto one another, and into the hole. In some cases this will fill those holes up - but it is determined based on the spatial relationships between those walls, the floor, and the light source. In these cases it can be very easy to fall into the habit of simply filling the holes in.

I'm pleased to say that looking at your swiss cheese, you did demonstrate an awareness of those individual elements, and you didn't simply fall into filling things in mindlessly. So good work there.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. I do want to quickly mention though that you appear to have completed it earlier than what's recommended. Generally speaking, we urge our students to do the texture challenge over a longer period, in parallel with their other lessons. This allows these complex problems more time to sink in, whereas when we do them all at once, it reduce the amount of time we have in between attempts to really mull over what we're learning, making it somewhat less effective.

In the future, be sure to follow the recommendations of when certain challenges are recommended to be completed, so you get the most out of the course.