Based on your description of the troubles you ran into, I can't help but feel a little validated in that ultimately students generally discover that it's best just to stick with what we recommend in the instructions. They will of course still attempt to find other paths, especially when it comes to thinking of their situation as demanding changes, which itself is unfortunate as it means more of their cognitive resources are going towards working against the instructions, thus getting in the way of them applying them as completely as they could have, but it is what it is.

Anyway, jumping right in with the structural aspect of the challenge, there are a few points I wanted to call out, although you're still handling this reasonably well:

• Firstly, it seems that you're skipping the step of including an ellipse through the midsection as shown here in the instructions. You tend to draw the ellipses on either side, but when it comes to ellipses that would be visible through the form (in the sense of how we draw through our boxes), you seem like you might be avoiding it in favour of a cleaner result.

• Secondly, you seem to skip the spokes/rims on a lot of these, and in the cases where you do include them you seem to only be considering the outward faces as we see here and here, skipping over establishing the thickness of those structures. This one is better executed in that you've included the side planes to show thickness, but as I noted towards the bottom right, you've got a few that continue on in space instead of cutting off where they hit the inner rim.

Continuing onto the textural aspect of the challenge, this is an area where I expect you had ended up investing the most time and running into the most complexity. It is undeniable that you've put a lot of effort into this part of things - but, as most students do, you've stumbled into a bit of a trap in this regard which definitely had a lot to do with this extra work you put in.

Being as far removed as we are from Lesson 2, it's very common for students to either forget entirely that we have different approaches we employ when delving into texture, or to remember vaguely that there was something, but still not go back and try and figure out what it was. In your case, I expect it was the former - it seems you forgot about it entirely, and as such you ended up employing purely constructional/explicit markmaking techniques, rather than those involving implicit markmaking that were introduced in Lesson 2's texture section.

Looking at any of your wheels in isolation, floating in the void, they look great. But as soon as you incorporate them into, say, an illustration of a car, all of that dense detail and visual complexity that you've needed to define the tire tread structures will draw a lot of attention, creating a focal point in the illustration whether you want it to or not. That isn't ideal, as it takes the ability to control how the viewer's eye experiences the image out of our hands. That's where implicit markmaking, and its focus on drawing the shadows forms cast, rather than the forms themselves, comes in.

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 means that even if we're depicting the exact same texture, the exact same arrangement of forms, it can result in it being depicted with very little visual complexity/contrast (in the case where all the shadows are so big they cover most of the surfaces and merge together, or where the shadows are so small they barely appear), or in it being depicted with lots of visual complexity/contrast (in the case where we're somewhere in between, lots of shadows and lots of lit areas). It also means that this can change as we move along the surface of the form, and don't have to stick to one level of detail density all the way through (hence why we practiced these concepts with the gradients from the texture analysis exercise).

So, as shown here, instead of drawing the textural forms themselves as we would construct any other form (by outlining and defining its volume with edges), we instead have to perform the more mentally taxing task of trying to keep track of how one of these textural forms sits in space, and what surfaces surround it, in order to design a cast shadow shape that reflects that spatial relationship. In the end, what's drawn isn't the textural form, but the impact it has on its surroundings.

Another issue that can arise in regards to all of this is that when it comes to those tires with shallow grooves, or really any texture consisting of holes, cracks, etc. it's very common for us to view these named things (the grooves, the cracks, etc.) as being the textural forms in question - but of course they're not forms at all. They're empty, negative space, and it's the structures that surround these empty spaces that are the actual forms for us to consider when designing the shadows they'll cast. This is demonstrated in this diagram. This doesn't always actually result in a different result at the end of the day, but as these are all exercises, how we think about them and how we come to that result is just as important - if not moreso.

Anyway, I'm still going to be marking this challenge as complete, as these textural issues are expected, and we prefer this challenge serve as a reminder for students to consider what else they might have left behind, and might be worth reviewing. At the very least there's these textural concepts, but do spend some time reflecting on whether or not anything else may have been allowed to slip through the cracks.

And of course, stick to our instructions/recommendations - don't try and find ways to tweak them to suit your situation better, as that's going to take cognitive resources that could otherwise be spent on applying those instructions as they're given.