Once upon a time, not so very long ago in the grand scheme, two of my friends and I got together in a group chat which apparently needed a name, so I called it "witchies" as there was a bit of the Triple Goddess vibe with our respective age gaps, at least partly influenced with how the director portrayed the three witches in a Macbeth I acted in way back at uni.  I said once I felt good enough I was going to draw us all as witchies.

Two years ago (yes you read that right x_x) I felt good enough, and so I started, intending it to be a 2018 Christmas present.  It was a bit of a challenge as I suck at doing real people so kind of vaguely made us all characters with the cute familiars, the oversized witch hats and pixie hoodie, and the ridiculously massive cauldron.

Last night was an exercise in frustration.  There was a bunch of chores to finish up, and then all I wanted to do was some art and to hopefully get the progblog knocked out before it got too late.

Or: why fyn has a ridiculously comprehensive and detailed head universe.

Like all good stories, it started off innocently enough.  I finished eyebrows and eyelashes and did some super quickie expression tests:

My lights are really close and pretty bright hence the intense reflection, if they're still too reflective under normal lighting conditions I'll have to fiddle with the node a bit more. 

Then it was onto clothes.

Everything kind of completely fell apart in October.  12yo had caught everything under the sun in Term 3 and so had missed a fair chunk of it.  At the beginning of Term 4 she continued insisting that she loved school and still wanted to go, but two weeks in I could count on one hand the number of times she had actually gone.  She kept insisting she was "sick" or "too tired" but would always be better just in time for gymnastics.  Things eventually came to a head when we had a massive blowout as I told her if she was really that sick then she was not going to gymnastics so she could recover properly and she told me to pull her out of school so she could go to gym (a threat I'd made a few times previously but hadn't done because I give too many chances).  I tried to get her to be reasonable and told her she could go to gym, and then she had to go to school for the rest of the week.  If she wanted to quit after that she was to tell me on the weekend and I

I was optimistic and tried but as expected it took me longer to ease back in than I wanted.

And then I injured my right thumb cleaning the stove and had a couple of days where holding the pen was painful (but towards the end of Day 0 and yesterday I tried anyway, today was better).

Currently working on trying to get Zara's hair sorted.  Took me a bit to remember how to x-mirror around the 3d cursor and even then because I hadn't applied the transforms to the curves the mirrored copies were wonkered.  Which was fine as I only wanted the same number of guides on both sides and didn't want the hairstyle to be symmetrical, but it's a bit of work adjusting.

I wasn't sure if I would manage a silly season shenanigans this year but successfully squizzled one in.  No story, just Taji and Rei spending silly season at the beach as a lot of people living along the coast of Australia do, and building a sandman because it's summer.

There was a bit of fun and games with this one as the dull mix brush (from a brushpack I downloaded) was feeling a bit awkward in one of the Krita point updates and I couldn't work out why.  I temporarily replaced it with a wet bristles brush but could not get my brain to cooperate with it.  I ended up booting the wet bristles brush out of my popup palette and deciding to use the the basic brush (that I use to colour because it's therapeutic even though selecting and filling areas would be a lot quicker) to cel shade which I haven't done for literal decades.  It didn't look terrible.

Even though we haven't gone away this Christmas and are only doing a couple of gatherings, I've still managed to completely fail to get anything worthwhile done when I have been able to do anything.  Last night I fell into a pit and after my computer decided to randomly crash (again) and I had to redo a whole pile of work, I ended up not even attempting the progblog and just crawling into bed to sulk.

Then today I played Pixelmon for most of the day with the kids and then youngest and I played Pokemon Go while walking my dog.

Work on the hair continues.

Most of this week has been taken up doing last second Christmas-related stuff that I'd forgotten (I'm pretty sure this is the first year I thought I better do a list for next year, in my defence it's the first time I've had to keep track of enough people to require a list), so work fell by the wayside a little bit.

I managed to start on the hair and rig the crest.

I shall do my utmost to keep up but this year silly season is seriously kerbstomping me x_x

And I don't think staying up late is helping that much but it feels like it is. 

We seem to be rigging all right, I did some big motions with limbs and turned her into a pretzel and here I was playing around with small expressions.

Split the panels just so I could show the non-animators among us the puppet controls and the result.

It can probably be surmised that I finished all the naily bits but I'll show them off anyway because yes.

What is this 5 weeks shenanigans.

So pretty much trying to pick up where I was before I jumped back to do more retopo.  That texture baking tool in 3dC is a lifesaver when you're inept like me x_x The skin texture is now reasonable enough for in your face shots:

And an in your face Eevee render as close as the clipping distance would let me get (I'm not even sure I have many if any extreme closeups like this):