Looking over your work here, I do have a number of points of advice to offer, and areas of the instructions to draw to your attention to help you make better use of this kind of exercise going forward. These issues are going to fall into the following categories, which I will then expand upon:

• Working from pure observation vs. identifying the forms, understanding how they sit in 3D space, and making marks based on that.

• Dealing with textures that are composed of cracks, holes, grooves, etc.

• The requirement of the exercise to create a smooth transition from the solid black area on the left, to the solid white area on the right - to blend those bars seamlessly into the texture gradient, without any discernible jump from bar to gradient.

Starting with the first point, here in the Lesson 2 texture material, I lay out an important reminder about exactly what it is we're doing when we approach capturing texture in our drawings for this course. I added this section some time ago (it's probably been a year, maybe even two by this point) because I was noticing that students still had a tendency to focus on finding the cast shadows in their reference images in order to draw them, which is not what we're after.

Rather, as explained in that section, texture is as much an extension of the same spatial reasoning skills we seek to develop throughout this course as everything else. It's about understanding how the textural forms themselves individually sit in space and how they relate to the surfaces around them, and then designing our cast shadow shapes based on that understanding. The reference image is not something you're copying - it's a source of information that you process, and then apply. Let's take a look at what that means in a bit more detail.

Here's an example involving a texture of melted wax. You'll notice that the reference image at the top isn't even viewed from top-down, because that isn't inherently required to understand how those forms are laid out. I've traced on top of the image some of the different "glob" forms, identifying the nature of the forms we're dealing with here.

In the first row beneath the reference image, this is a representation of what we're thinking about for this texture that we're crafting. Note that this isn't something you'd draw when doing the exercise (although that is in part what the "study" square serves, and you can do something like this off to the side in a full gradient-sized rectangle if you feel it helps), it's just a visualization of how we're thinking about our the texture we're building. We've placed a bunch of wax globs along the length of the surface.

Now the second row shows what we're actually drawing - notice how each individual shadow shape is being outlined, purposefully designed. The shape of each shadow is what captures the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface receiving that shadow, so it is that shape that does the heavy lifting to imply the presence of the form casting it. As we get closer to the left, the shadows being cast get longer and deeper.

Finally, in the third row, we fill in those shadow shapes, resulting in a gradient of density from sparse on the far right (where the shadows were smaller), and dense on the far left (where the shadows get longer and deeper).

When it comes to the lengths of the shadows, we can see this in a different way by looking at this diagram. The light source exists on the right side, so everything closest to it has a much sharper angle to the light source, resulting in smaller/shorter shadows. Everything to the left however receives the light at a much shallower angle, allowing those shadows to be projected farther.

Now, circling back to your work, there are cases where you've demonstrated a more conscious designing of your shadow shapes based on the information available to you - number 7's a good example of this - but as you progress through the set, I can definitely see you slipping further from thinking of each mark you put down as a shadow being cast by a specific form, and more into trying to draw from observation, or otherwise create a more general impression of the texture (rather than drawing marks based on specific forms that are present). For example, if we look at number 14 - the elephant skin - here you've drawn the grooves and cracks in the skin themselves.

This brings us to my second point - grooves, cracks, holes, etc. are not textural forms. Rather, they're empty, "negative" space, the absence of form. It's not at all uncommon for students to end up focusing on them however, because they're the elements we can ascribe names to. "Hole", "groove", "crack" represent the same kind of thing in our brains as "rock" or "lump" or "ridge", and so we interpret them the same way, focusing on drawing them.

As shown here in this diagram, we need to focus on the actual forms - the walls surrounding this empty space, which cast shadows upon one another and upon the floor at the bottom. Doing so in this manner keeps us from simply filling those holes in, which tends to appear much more flat, and forces us to think about the texture as it exists in 3D space, not just as a flat series of shapes.

Another good thing to keep in mind is that if you're "painting" your textures stroke by stroke (as opposed to purposely designing them by defining the outline of the given shadow shape, then filling it in), then there's a better chance that you're just drawing what you're seeing from direct observation, and skipping the step of understanding how that textural form sits in space, and drawing the shadow it would cast.

Now the last point I wanted to make is to point out that as you progressed through the set, you appeared to be less and less focused on the purpose of the black/white bars on either end of the gradient. As explained in the second paragraph of this section (I've added the bolding for emphasis):

In between these two bars, I want you to use your texture to transition from black to white, left to right. I'd recommend starting towards the center, as this is where you're going to get the most detail due to the balance of light and dark. As you move to the left, let your shadows deepen and grow larger, and make sure they blend seamlessly into the black bar. As you move to the right, let your shadows get blasted out as they get closer to the light source, leaving only those in the deepest cracks where textural forms meet.

There are definitely cases where you did this correctly - 15 and 18 are very good examples, and there are others that are pretty good as well. But there are many more cases like 23 where you've just left the black bar as a matter of course, and appear to have forgotten what it was for. In such cases, try not to fall into auto-pilot, where you're putting things down but without considering what purpose they're meant to serve. If you find yourself doing something automatically without being aware of why, that's a good sign that it's time to review the instructions for the exercise, and the relevant material from the lectures/notes.

Now, there is a lot you can do to improve, but you have completed the challenge and it will be marked as such. Hopefully the advice I've offered here will help you continue to get more out of the exercise in the future.