Alrighty, jumping right in - as with your wheels, your work here is very nice to look at, and it's clear you've put a ton of work into it.

Starting with what you've done well, there's quite a bit. I think the most meaningful strength here is how intentionally designed and crafted each individual shape is - there's no randomness, no haphazardness, everything is purposeful and controlled. There are also a number of instances where you've very clearly thought about the forms that make up your textures and have extremely effectively leveraged those shadow shapes to craft a relatively smooth gradient from right to left, building up the shadows in a manner that demonstrates your understanding of how they work. The cauliflower, coconut and walnut shell are very good examples of this to name a few.

There are also a lot of others that are definitely well done, but what comes into question is how much you're thinking about the shapes you fill in as cast shadows (meaning, being cast by a form blocking the light source and projecting onto an existing surface), and how much you're potentially taking the less mentally taxing road of filling in the gaps between those structures. I think that it is a bit mixed in that regard, even within the scope of individual textures - for example, the elephant skin on the sparser side is tackled very well, where the wrinkles are projecting clear shadow shapes, but when you get into the denser area (where you seem to transition to a different textural aspect of the elephant skin where it's more cracked and fissured), you may transition more to filling in the negative spaces in between those sections.

This issue relating to textures featuring negative space elements is one that I actually did mention to you in the critique for your wheel challenge, although it was more of an addendum that didn't directly relate to your work, but was rather something I wanted to share to provide further information. It included this diagram, though there's a bit more explanation there that you can refer back to.

Along with those areas where it's mixed in as the gradient moves to the darker zone, there are cases like the bird nest and the elastic band ball where you're falling into the trap more broadly. I expect it is because there's just so many textural forms that eventually you give into the temptation to let the darkness reduce seemingly unnecessary busywork - but it's in all of that arduous, time consuming consideration of each textural form that the cast shadows are able to meaningfully imply the kind of structure you're after. It does admittedly get easier, and one picks up a stronger sense of how to imply that detail without all this work, but to get there it does require a lot of effort (which is saying a lot, given that you absolutely put a ton into what you did here). Honestly you're not even that far off, but I do think that with some of those more stringy kinds of textures, it just got to be too much and you hit your limit. Similarly with the sourdough bread texture, while it wasn't the same kind of stringy subject matter, there are a lot of holes, and the complexity of the texture may have pushed you towards approaching it in a manner that simplified the problem (but ultimately also changed the nature of the exercise).

Another concern that arises when we fall into the pattern of filling in gaps is that we tend to shift away from thinking as explicitly about the way in which our textural forms sit in 3D space, and this can result in other issues. For example, for your cobblestone paving, along the right side you were doing fine, casting the shadows towards the left (away from the light source), but as we move further in that direction the shadows actually start eating into our forms from the opposite side, suggesting that the light source is on the far left.

As a whole, I think you are certainly headed in the right direction, and have progressed quite a bit already, but there are two things that I think will help you bring it all together:

• Keep in mind that the surface beneath the texture is itself, still a surface that can receive cast shadows. So if you have spaghetti strewn about a smooth surface, you don't have to jump to "everything that isn't spaghetti gets filled in". You can allow areas of white to appear on the surface in between the noodles.

• Nothing is sacred. We can easily fall into a mindset where we become reticent to cast big bold shadows across certain textural forms. For example, while you did it a little bit with your spaghetti texture (I feel like this is a good example for a number of concerns, so I'm going to keep using it), it definitely feels like you were afraid to cast really big shadows across the strands of spaghetti you decided to represent in white, and so you were stuck with jumping between the small shadows cast by the strands overlapping nearby, to basically filling a space in entirely. There wasn't much in the way of having an individual strand cast a much longer shadow (which as noted in this diagram which I'd shared with you in the wheel challenge critique, is very much how those darker ends of the gradients are achieved - by allowing shadows to get obscenely large by way of the light's angle of incidence being very low. While the cobblestone paving ran into the issue with the shadows being cast in the wrong direction on the left side, this was an example of a case where you did lean into those longer cast shadows.

Now, one last thing. Here's a diagram/explanation of how to approach thinking about this exercise, from start to finish:

• 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.

You definitely understand this for the most part, but the main things I wanted to reiterate is that every spot of ink we draw in this exercise is a cast shadow, and thus requires us to think about the form casting it (per these reminders), and just how far we can push those cast shadows (in terms of extending them) to achieve the demands of our gradient.

Anyway! I know I focused pretty heavily on issues here, but it's primarily because I wanted to give you as much to take away as possible. As a whole, you're demonstrating the understanding I'm looking for to a pretty decent extent (always room for improvement of course), and even if you were to toss out everything I said here, the kinds of detail work you're clearly capable of as can certainly be brought to bear to create some truly magnificent pieces.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.