I thought I'd already done August Homeschool Miscellany but apparently I'd done July and collected photos for August but not actually written the post.  Oops.  So everything ended up getting grouped as I've been struggling this year.

It's no accident that October was left out, apparently we didn't do anything that I could include.

Goolugatup Heathcote Museum

We initially heard that there was a museum in the building of the Heathcote Cultural Precinct when we attended a relative's birthday party there.  The precinct was a mental institution in the 1920s for mildly afflicted people and was one of the pioneering ones that broke away from the methods that seem to result in buildings being haunted.

What we didn't know was that the museum was really, really tiny (one room) and we had to wander through the art gallery to get there.

Did a shenanigans comic for Silly Season Shenanigans for a change partly because it's been a while since I did a comic and mostly because this happened on Christmas Day.

I really need to find out what's going on with Linux Krita (unless the problem has been fixed in the system update/s that will probably be waiting for me when we get back to Perth), as exporting to jpg with MacOS Krita is working exactly as it's supposed to.

Hope you're all having a good silly season :D

Stuff is a mess right now.  Don't really want to talk about it as it involves other people (spoiler alert: nobody is dead yet and J and I are still together seeing as those are the things people seem to be jumping to).  End result of that is my head went into interesting places that are hard to come back from and while I really tried hard to do some art to stabilise, well basically it didn't work out, so buggerall got done.

Literally buggerall of anything got done.  No art (hence the name of this post), no moderation work for OCA, barely any housework, definitely not the photobooks which I wanted to start on last month because I'm not sure about postage times due to some pointless virus, not much of anything.

I wonder if my hive crew have been missing my incessantly nonsensical comments or if they're enjoying the serenity.

As I mentioned at the end of the last progblog I wrote two weeks ago (x_x), I finally managed to pick up a cute laptop (I'm so used to getting the highest spec'd things that getting something practically off the shelf and only upgrading storage feels so weird and wrong) and get back into the overpriced (I'm now broke for the next 6 years) and very...um..."special" Apple ecosystem that I have this love/hate relationship with (love it because it's the one that gives me the least problems and I find their devices fun to use, and hate it because it is so very overpriced and some things make me -_-).

October ProgBlog 3 is technically November ProgBlog 1 and just isn't called as such because I was a seriously sleep deprived idiot at the time.

Where I left off, I'd started on the hairs by doing the reasonably easy eyelashes and eyebrows first.  Okay eyebrows are pretty easy, just make a density map and then comb.  Eyelashes I always have to keep painting hairs on carefully and then combing equally carefully.

And then had to tone things down a little so that they didn't look like oil painting strokes.

_{Only vaguely related, I have read about someone using hair particles as oil painting strokes previously but they were asking questions about it and I didn't see the outcome.}

Then there was a system update which let me use my gpu for rendering again, yay!

And then I actually tested hybrid mode and it was about 20 seconds quicker on my test render.

Something along these lines.

Along with my usual "I don't really feel like I've done enough to be worth a progblog" silliness, it's been a crazy few weeks.  Sprat came up late for her yearly holiday after being uncertain about whether she'd be able to come up at all (she normally comes during the July school holidays) and did all the Christmas shopping, which basically meant hitting the shops almost every day for a couple of weeks.  She eventually managed to get it all done.

Then this weekend I had to supervise a weekend long teenager party (long annoying story). 

As I was squeezing in art around shopping and staying up really late to do so, and then the weekend long party, I will probably need to catch up on sleep at some stage.

A bit of unexpected chaos happened on Friday and it kind of wiped me out.

And then it was followed by a kind of busy weekend.

Which of course means being up kind of late Sunday night (right now) trying to bang out a progblog like people actually care about or even understand my delirious blender rambling XD

This week's shenanigans involved trying to get the perfect bake once I figured out how to bake.  I could not get the perfect bake and I suspect it's either something to do with my cage mesh or blender is super aggressively caching something or some combination thereof.  So in the interests of getting the hell on with it I managed to blunder my way to a good enough bake and hopefully I'll figure it out down the line.

Missed a week again, oops :S I was supposed to post on the weekend I posted the last songpic but stuff happened, just not that.

Over the last week I finally managed to finish the retopo and apparently it has 8k odd faces with the mirror modifier, more once the subd modifier gets turned on, and probably more again when I get around to applying the mirror modifier which will probably be pretty soon (after I version save XD).  I then chucked a rig in it and tried it out.

Too many gloomydoomers on my hive feed plus listening to Owl City: Shooting Star on loop results in fyn taking too long a break from retopo (this while mildly indfuriating is perfectly normal as fyn usually has to do what art brain says or bad things happen).

So this is my "it will be okay, keep going, you're doing great, we can make things better" because doing this kind of thing is easier than talking XP

_{so yes that's a self-indulgent selfie at the top}

In the spirit of failing to do more in the same amount of time, I ended up having to clean out the art cupboard (a job I've been studiously avoiding for the last 5 years, I also bought a cube shelf for it that fits a bit more perfectly than I thought it would) and will over the next week or so probably have to sort out the rest of the crap that I've been putting off and should have probably done during covid except that I took the opportunity to go hard on this thing instead.

On the bright side the art cupboard looks organised now and I can't even share photos because trying to get photos off my phone is apparently incredibly difficult for linux.