Texture is definitely one of those areas students struggle with a great deal. A lot of it comes down to the complexity of the concepts. We have plans to update the material (as we're doing with the whole course), and there are definitely things that can be changed to help improve its clarity, so I'm looking forward to clearing Lesson 1's overhaul out of the way soon, then getting through the box challenge, and finally sinking my teeth into a meaningful update of the texture material in Lesson 2.

Fortunately, you won't have to wait - I'll be calling out a number of points here that should by and large help improve your understanding of the concepts.

What I'm seeing from your work by and large is that you seem to be somewhat derailed from the elements you should be paying attention to, in favour of what will help you achieve the overall superficial goals of the exercise. In other words, there are a lot of things you're doing that aren't in line with the instructions in order to achieve a result that generally looks like it fits. This is a pretty natural and common reaction to the confusion, uncertainty, and lack of confidence, that this concept is well known for by this point.

While texture feels like this out-of-left-field black-sheep uninvited-cousin to the rest of what we cover in the course, it's not. It's actually right at home. Textures are made up of small forms that sit along another surface. So for example, the bark of a tree is made up of all these layered flakes but they wrap around a cylindrical structure, following its surface. Each individual textural form - that is, the "flakes" - sits in 3D space in relation to other textural forms around it. It all comes down to the 3D spatial relationships, which if you recall is the core focus of this course.

We could ostensibly approach textures in exactly the way we approach every other 3D form - with construction, drawing each and every form in its entirety, one by one. This would provide the viewer with all the information they need to understand the relationships between the different forms at play, but it has one major downside (aside from it taking forever, which in this course we don't really consider as a negative): your drawings would end up so densely packed with detail that it will be horrific to look at. The viewer's eyes will jump around all over, struggling to find somewhere to rest. The viewer simply won't be able to tell how they're meant to process the image in the absence of any visual hierarchy. Normally it is through composition - that is, deciding how a piece is arranged in 2D space, where to focus detail, where to leave detail out, and so forth to create areas of rest and areas of interest - that we guide the viewer's eyes through a piece. We can't do that if we're shackled by the fact that any detail that exists must be drawn, and anything that has not been drawn doesn't exist.

Those are the shackles of "explicit markmaking", as explained in Lesson 2. What is drawn exists, what is not drawn does not exist.

Implicit markmaking however gives us a different set of tools. Implicit markmaking allows us to suggest that certain forms are present without ever drawing them directly. They allow us to disengage to a degree what is being conveyed to the viewer in terms of what exists, and which marks are being placed on the page to represent them. But this requires us to actually employ implicit markmaking correctly.

In this course, our implicit markmaking manifests in one form: cast shadows. As shown here, where we've got a sphere arranged on top of a box, the explicit portion are the lines that actually define the forms themselves. The implicit portion are the shadows they cast upon one another. While the implicit shadows on their own don't tell us everything about the forms themselves, they do help us to understand that there are forms there, and they give us a sense of how they relate to one another in 3D space.

Unlike the explicit marks which will always need to be drawn in a specific manner in order to consistently represent the same thing in the same way, shadows are more flexible. This diagram illustrates something similar to what we might look at when arranging one of our texture analysis gradients - a bunch of forms along a surface - but from the side. In fact, let's take a look at it arranged like this as well, which roughly matches this scale texture from your homework.

The forms that are closer to the light source receive light rays at a fairly steep angle. This means that soon after the light ray crests the edge of the form, it's going to hit the ground. Conversely, those forms that are further away get hit at a much shallower angle, meaning that once the ray crests that edge, it'll continue travelling for a while before it hits the ground. This means that the further the form is, the longer and deeper its shadow gets.

Another way of looking at that is that a shadow may manifest in different ways for the exact same arrangement of forms - it all depends on where the light source is positioned. If we were worried about realism in rendering and lighting, that would be cracking open a whole can of worms that we certainly won't be getting into here. For our purposes here however, we are focused on identifying, understanding, and leveraging all the tools at our disposal for a single purpose: visual communication. So to that end, all we really need to keep in mind is that where the lines of explicit markmaking must be a certain way in order to represent a certain specific arrangement of forms, cast shadows can be very small, or very long and stretched out, without the forms in question ever changing.

This means that when we create our gradients, we can purposely have our shadows expand and grow bigger, covering more and more surface area as we move towards the left, while conversely having those shadows shrink to nothing as we move towards the right (closer to the light source).

The most difficult part of what we ask is that we're having students attempt (and in many cases, especially towards the beginning, fail) to draw the implicit shadows without first drawing the explicit forms, since once you've drawn the explicit forms you've already put their limitations into play. There's no two ways about it: it's hard. It does get easier as your spatial reasoning skills improve, but it's hard any way you slice it. Students want to draw the explicit marks first so they can plan out their cast shadows - but they're not allowed to. So, they do their best, their shadow shapes turn out poorly, and they get frustrated.

All I can really say in regards to that is to tackle things one form at a time. Let's look at what that might look like.

Here's an example of how we might approach a texture of melted wax. I purposely chose a photo that is not simply top-down, as I want to emphasize that we're not simply copying a reference from observation. The notes go into more detail on this here, and based on your work I think this might be something you were confused about, so I strongly encourage you to review that section. What we're doing is understanding how the forms in question are arranged, and then designing shadow shapes based on that understanding. We are not reproducing the reference, but rather using the reference as a source of information.

• Starting with the reference photo, I'm paying attention to the forms that are present there, and considering how I can break them apart. I've drawn over the image to show what it is I'm thinking about, and which relatively small pieces of information I'm extracting from an otherwise visually complex photograph.

• Moving to the first row of the 3, this one's a visualization of how I'm thinking about arranging the forms in my head. Note: I cannot actually see these all together in my head. To be fair, I actually can't see anything in my mind's eye, so visualization's not an option for me to begin with (I've got aphantasia), but even for those who can visualize, that's not what we're really aiming to do here. All we're thinking about is how we might arrange our forms in general terms - are they going to overlap one another, are they all going to be small, are there going to be some larger forms, etc.

• Continuing onto the next row, here's where I actually start drawing. I'm designing the shadow shapes for each form, one by one. Note that I'm outlining them - that allows me to consider the specific shape, the design of which will represent the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surfaces receiving them. This is how you should be approaching all your shadows, by first outlining them rather than trying to draw them as singular strokes or lines, or otherwise "paint" them on stroke by stroke.

• Finally, we fill in those shadow shapes. If we hold to the principle that the shadows get larger and larger the further they are from the light source, then we'll get bigger shadows to the left side, helping to both create a gradual transition from light to dark, and to create a more seamless transition into the black bar on the left. Frequently in your work you tended to leave that bar with a harder edge that was quite apparent. Admittedly the one I did in this example could be better too - the one from the exercise demo demonstrates this seamless transition better.

Anyway, if I had to quickly and more succinctly summarize the issues you're encountering:

• You appear to be focused a fair bit on reproducing your reference image and drawing what you're seeing, without the "understanding" phase explained here. This results in you relying heavily on first putting explicit marks down, then having to try and shift back into implicit markmaking once it's too late.

• You're somewhat hit-and-miss when it comes to working with cast shadows - there are cases where you fill in shapes that are already present (as opposed to designing a new shadow shape to reflect the relationship between the form casting it and the surface receiving it). A good example of this are the cracks in the elephant skin, where you've filled the cracks in entirely. These notes explain why this is incorrect, although your bread texture from further into the set does a better job of reflecting this kind of "negative space" texture being handled more correctly. The "Ropes" texture is also one that shows this issue of filling spaces in, and we can see that it resulted in an issue where you had to figure out how to transition from these unchanging solid black shapes into the faint area.

• You're leveraging hatching in a number of places to artificially transition from black to white. What we're doing with the shadow shapes is very similar to hatching, in that we're creating a gradual shift in density from many black shapes close together, to making them more sparse. Hatching itself however should not be used here, as it entirely sidesteps the actual spatial problems we're tackling. The only marks you should be putting down are designed and filled shadow shapes.

One last point - in regards to the fish scales texture, I strongly recommend that you read through these notes. The lower section of the diagram specifically addresses how you've tried to handle the "lost and found" edges as you move to the right. You end up choosing which lines to keep in and which to remove at random, which makes it look rather haphazard. Instead, logically speaking the points where those different scale forms meet would be where shadows would be liable to get "trapped" for longer, and would be the last place to be blasted out by the light source.

I hope that helped! I will of course be marking this challenge as complete, as it's really about doing the work so that further feedback can be provided for you to continue forwards.