This critique is mainly going to focus on one specific page of your homework. While that's not normally how I approach this, the reason is fairly straight forward. This page seems to be the main one where you opted to use an ellipse guide when constructing your wheels, and so it's the one that has the least interference from other issues.

When I say "other issues" I really don't mean there's anything inherently wrong as far as our expectations for students at this stage. Granted, it would have been best if you'd stuck with the ellipse guide for all of them, as we encourage students to do so in the instructions (specifically at the bottom of the assignment section), for the simple reason that ellipses are hard to draw, and they are a lot harder to draw when you have to keep many of them spaced out in very specific steps. As this course is designed to effectively teach students how to practice, and the expectation is that not only will they continue practicing these exercises in their regular warmups throughout this course, but also continuing forward in their own routines, we do not expect students to have mastered control of their ellipses at this stage. So, if a student has to worry about both the elements this challenge focuses upon and that specific control of their ellipses, they're going to get less out of the challenge as a whole.

While it's absolutely true that working with a smaller master ellipse template is not easy (due to the size constraints), it is still workable - especially when working with a ballpoint pen, which is also encouraged in the lesson material - and usually ends up being more valuable towards our goals than trying to freehand them entirely.

Anyway, jumping in with the structural aspect of the challenge, you've handled constructing the body of the wheels pretty well, using a series of ellipses to flesh out the structure and achieve a nice bump to its profile which helps to create the impression that the ball is not fully solid all the way through, and that if it were dropped it would land with a bounce rather than a heavy thud. I do however have two concerns as to how you've approached the spokes/rims of the wheels:

• As shown here when drawing the side plane of the spoke, you had its farther edge continue on where it should have stopped where it hit the surface of the rim's inner tube. Keep in mind the depth that each concentric ring of your wheel's construction represents.

• and as shown here it seems there are also cases where you skipped over defining the side plane of some of your spokes entirely.

When it comes to the textural aspect of this challenge, this is actually something of an intentional trap. Being as far removed from earlier concepts in the course - like the texture section of Lesson 2 - it's very common for students to allow certain things to slip through the cracks and get forgotten, and nothing ends up suffering from this so much as texture. As such, we find that presenting what is very much a textural problem (in the sense that these tire treads are made up of forms arranged along the surface of an existing structure, which is the definition given in Lesson 2) but not describing it explicitly in those terms, we leave it to the student to fall into one of a few categories:

• Either the student recognizes this as a textural problem and reviews the related lesson material so as to do their best to apply those concepts here (this one happens on occasion but it is pretty rare)

• or the student recognizes this as a textural problem and remembers that we deal with texture by using a balance of light/black shapes, but does not review the material and ends up using those light/black shapes in different ways which may overlap somewhat with the concept of implicit markmaking introduced in Lesson 2, but not enough to really show they went back and reviewed it (probably the most common)

• or the student doesn't recognize the problem as a textural one and ends up trying to draw each and every textural form through constructional means, using explicit markmaking (somewhere in the middle).

You fall into the second group, and while you do have wheels that objectively came out looking quite nice when floating in a void (number 6 is nicely detailed for example), if we were to use these as part of an actual illustration, all of that concentrated detail would immediately draw the viewer's attention, creating a focal point - whether you want it to or not. This is where implicit markmaking comes into play.

As discussed in Lesson 2 - and mind you this explanation will be brief, so you will want to review that material in more depth - implicit markmaking is all about not drawing the objects you're trying to convey to the viewer, but rather draw the impact they have on their surroundings. Specifically, that impact is the shadows they cast, as it is the specific shape and design of the shadow that conveys the 3D relationship between the form casting it and the surface receiving it.

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 while the textural forms casting the shadows can all be identical, they do not have to cast a shadow of the same size. The specifics of where we place the light source for our purposes in this course isn't so relevant - but what matters to us is that we have an excuse to decide where we want to include lots of visual contrast and detail (which is going to be those areas where the cast shadows are not so small as to be invisible, but not so big as to combine many of them into singular shapes. This allows us to convey the texture of those surfaces while being in control of how much detail we are required to actually put down on the page. It is also the basis for the kind of quick and loose "implicit" detail that you might see in actual drawings like the house in this fictional poster.

It's not that this is the way to approach texture - rather, it's how we approach texture in this course, such that it aligns with the core goal of the course itself, always feeding back into having the student think about 3D spatial relationships.

Lastly, 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.

Now, since this outcome was intended, students aren't penalized for it, so I will be marking this challenge as complete. Do however take some time to consider whether there are other concepts that you may have left out of your warmups or otherwise neglected to carry forward with you, and take this opportunity to review those sections before continuing onto Lesson 7 to finish up the course. At the very least that should include the textural material, for which these reminders serve as a good starting point.