I needed a day to work on a birthday present for my favourite sibling.  Prior to that, here's about where I was up to.

A little something for my favourite sibling's birthday.

I wanted to colour it but I left it late because I'm clever like that XD

I fell so far off the track I'm not sure I'll be able to find it again, maybe it was a cliff I plummeted off? Who thought building a railroad through this kind of territory was a good idea?

Guess I'll just have to make yet another one.  Again.  There's probably a perfectly good plain not far away that would have made for a much easier journey too.

I honestly did not mean to go this long without producing a progblog :|

I have the excuse of being on Christmas Island, hanging with family and absolutely not enjoying the experience of working on my Surface Pro (I hate Windows) in January.

We were still on Christmas Island for most of January so it was still mostly geared towards being with family.

His skin stung and his ears echoed with a painful, high pitched noise that was taking its sweet time subsiding.

Why? Why had he used self destruct?

He didn't want to look, but he had to know.  Carefully, he opened his eyes.

Blackness.  His already rapidly beating heart attempted evacuation out of his mouth.  Was he blind? Had he not shielded his face in time? Pinpricks of light seared his eyeballs, and thankfully the blackness lifted, revealing the impact crater the force of the explosion had left on the battlefield.  Song's sore eyes darted around his side of the field.

"Scruffy!" Relief escaped him in the name as his badly damaged umbreon staggered up, paws splayed out wide.  Earlier in the battle it had been in defiance, head down as a show of aggression.  Now he was barely able to stand, and his head was down because lifting it was too much effort.

They had won the round, but at what cost?

The teenager made the decision some time this month that he needed to be more responsible and started voluntarily practising basic life skills.  One involved cooking up a batch of sausages for lunch (plus both boys just felt like sausage sizzle apparently), and while he was about it he decided to experiment with steaming some of them.

November had to be cruisy after the insanity of October, plus we usually start winding down about now anyway.  We stayed home a lot.

A couple of years ago (eep!) I started doing sketchies of starter pokemon I either chose or would have chosen.  Part of the reason was to keep trying to do this "warm up sketch" idea I kept reading about (it doesn't seem to work for me) and another part was trying to post daily on steem (I failed, and given how tiring it was I started advising especially new artists to make a post schedule if they wanted to maintain some semblance of routine but not to try daily, and given how many people burned out trying I keep advising this).

A comment on the chikorita piece on deviantART recently reminded me that I hadn't finished the series so I decided to continue it.

And bashed out Piplup so fast I thought I better do the rest of them and post them in one post rather than posting several crappy sketchies over the next few days XD

Silhouetted raunchiness, don't come in if you're a bit prudish :)

Cut this one fine again but at least I'm usually up late at this time.  When I'm in Perth I'm usually up to see in the new year, and then I stay up another hour til it's new year for Sprat.  I'm home for the holidays this year so no real need to stay up the extra hour :)

Mum, Sprat, the girl child and I saw in the new year together in an entertaining fashion, all the men in our family had piked out early XD

No story for this one, it's late and I'm old.

Hope you've all had an awesome silly season and are geared up for a great year :D