Starting with the structural aspect of the challenge, I'll skip over anything relating to the ellipses, as obviously freehanding them will have put you at a pretty severe disadvantage. The thing about that is that it's not just that it makes it harder to place the ellipses where we need them to fall. Rather, the fact that we end up having to continue building off ellipses that may be way off will also make us predisposed to taking less care with other aspects of the construction that we may otherwise have handled better. In effect, our subconscious is more likely to view it as a lost cause, and then when deciding whether or not to put in the extra time for other steps, it's less likely to do so.

So for example, we know that as with the rest of the course, we should be drawing through our forms as we build them up, applying the ghosting method to every single mark we execute, and so forth - but as we can see here, when constructing the spokes of this wheel's rims (and those of many others), you skipped quite a few constructional steps and were not taking much care in terms of applying the ghosting method to each and every mark. Rather, your approach broke down to being one more of drawing directly from observation, and relying more on your auto-pilot to get you through as well as it could.

While I understand why it would have happened, it is important to keep in mind that everything we do throughout this course must be done in a hyper-intentional manner. That is, we need to be conscious of the choices we make, so as not to switch into auto-pilot and allowing our subconscious to dictate how we approach the problems we're facing. It is by being hyper-intentional in this manner that we are able to gradually rewire and retrain our autopilot, making it more reliable and consistent. Relying on the autopilot here on the other hand doesn't do much to instill new habits and behaviours.

That's not to say all of them were quite so rough. The rims/spokes on this one, though a little scratchy, and though it did still skip constructional steps and jump in too complex right off the bat, did demonstrate more patience and care in its construction.

Continuing onto the textural aspect of the challenge, this is where the challenge becomes something of an intentional trap. Being as far removed from Lesson 2's textural concepts, it's fairly common for students to fall into one of two categories:

• Those who remember that textural problems are addressed using some sort of filled black shapes, although not necessarily employing them exclusively to convey the textural forms, or to specifically use them to represent cast shadows (instead opting to employ them more as form shading instead).

• Those who don't recognize the tire treads - which are made up of small forms sitting along the surface of a larger structure - as a textural problem, and thus tackle the whole thing through more constructional means employing a lot of linework to define each structure.

You fall into the latter of these two groups, although again - your linework does leave a fair bit to be desired, as you're not employing the ghosting method as one generally would when tackling texture. Admittedly I did see the very slightest beginnings of cast shadows on this one, but for some reason you didn't seem particularly committed to it, and didn't see it through any further.

When it comes to texture specifically - at least, how we handle it here, which is very specific to this course and what it seeks to develop in our students - we are ultimately looking at the same kind of problem that the course as a whole explores: spatial reasoning. We imply the marks we draw (you can refer to the implicit vs explicit markmaking section for more specific information on this) by drawing the shadows our textural forms cast on their surroundings, not by drawing the forms themselves (in terms of outlining them, or otherwise drawing anything about the form itself). It's the shape of the shadow itself, which is designed based on our understanding of the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it and the surface receiving it. And so, as stressed in these reminders, in this course we're never just drawing what we see. We're looking at our references, and understanding what they tell us about the forms in question, and then deciding on how to convey the relationships between them in space.

The reason we use implicit markmaking instead of explicit is fairly simple, although it's not always obvious. A wheel/tire drawn fully through construction may look excellent floating in the void, all full of detail. But when it becomes part of an existing drawing, all of that packed detail can actually work against you by drawing the viewer's eye to it whether you want it to or not. This interferes with our ability to control composition (which is all about dictating how the viewer experiences a piece, what they look at and in which order), which while outside of the scope of this course, is still something I want to give students the tools to engage with more easily.

Explicit markmaking basically locks us into an agreement with the viewer: whatever is drawn is present, and whatever has not been drawn, is not present. And therefore to convey each textural form, we have to declare its presence explicitly. Implicit markmaking on the other hand gives us more freedom by disconnecting the marks we draw from the specifics of what is present.

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, which essentially means that the same form might cast very different shadows based on where on the object or where in space it is situated, we can exert control over where we want to place shadows of a different sort without changing the nature of the form that is casting it.

Now, the textural issue is fairly normal, and is not the sort of thing for which I assign revisions. What does demand revisions here however is that in the face of overwhelming complexity and detail, you changed the methodologies of the course, approaching it with a greater focus on drawing from observation, rather than building things up from simple to complex, and taking your time with every stroke.

Remember - your responsibility here is to give the task, and every sub-task it may involve, as much time as they individually require. Every form, every mark, everything. You may only have a certain amount of time for a given drawing session, but that does not mean that you need to complete an entire page, or an entire wheel, within that one session. Breaking the tasks up across multiple sittings will allow you to invest as much time as the task demands, without modification.

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