technonaturalist

It’s actually an upward spiral (dragon is pointing upwards) but I’m working from the head down therefore it’s a downward spiral :D

Scales here are shown with the pbr lighting that I switched to as I’m now in the pink section (last section yay!) and the uniform lighting made the glossiness blinding. I’ve had to switch depending on the colour or where I was, needed the uniform lighting for under the arm for example.

I was kind of referring to a scene in *Ponyo *but it’s been so long I can’t even remember if that’s what she actually says, I have a feeling that it may have been “I want legs” and in true fyn style I am much too lazy busy to see if there’s a clip on Youtube.

Anyway, I do have legs. Well, about 3.5 legs.

Made some pretty decent progress this week mostly because I’ve set two half-days of work (when I have to pick up 12yo from school so she gets to the early after school stuff on time) and also switched to hacking on AER stuff during the day and doing other work at night as I can usually steal some time during the day if we don’t go out for whatever reason and we’ve been home quite a bit recently. I also paused working on Witchies for a couple of days while I try to “catch up” on AER stuff (I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to catch up as this thing doesn’t have a deadline, I think I’ve been working on it for so long I just desperately want to be much, much further along than I am).

Finally got into the green section!

The one and only downside to this is that the next section is the blue section and with it more legs.

Everything has been all over the place lately mostly due to insomnia which is partially caused by the cold making my problem side hurt forever. Only in winter do I occasionally regret not moving up to the tropics like JJ kept saying we should. I need to hang around here for a while more though. I’ve also been plagued by guilt procrastination which is quite possibly one of the stupidest mental states to ever exist and should not be a thing due to the sheer illogical mind blowing stupidity of it. There’s probably a technical term for it that I should learn. Basically it involves needing to do something (in my case, some chores) but absolutely not wanting to so badly that I not only give myself excruciating headaches with how desperately I don’t want to do it (I described to JJ in a text that I would just about prefer taking a bullet to the head than be forced to do something no amount of money could make me care about), but because I then feel like the most worthless and terrible human being ever for not doing these things that need to be done, I then punish myself by not doing the thing that I just as desperately wanted to be doing instead of the stupid things I didn’t care about. End result as one can imagine, exactly nothing gets done at all.

By necessity we ended term 1 pretty quietly with the Scitech homeschooling lessons. Occasionally one or both boys missed some lessons due to colds, which I didn’t realise at the time was a taste of things to come.

After one of the lessons both of them got to, 10yo decided to blow some pocket money at the Scitech shop on some compound eye glasses. There was some hilarity when both of them had a go with it the first time.

Those tiny little leg scales are very fiddly and I have three and a half more legs and then pretty much the entire tail section still to go x_x

The body scales are a lot easier!

I’ve tested replacing the outline with a flat multiply layer and it didn’t look good and I also managed to lose some vibrancy (I’m actually using the same colours in each section, just the flats have no glossiness or metalness and the glossy bits do) so that idea went flying out the window. My next experiment will be just doing shadow on a multiply layer. If that fails too then I’ll just have to leave the scale outline on because currently it looks a hell of a lot better with than without (and I don’t want to leave the outline on because reasons).

Fallen back into old habits of stressing out about how much I’m not getting done art-wise because I’m spending so much time on the rest of life and taking those extra hours out of sleep time which is totally healthy especially given how long it takes me to go to sleep and according to my Fitbit I wake up really frequently during the night (not that I remember ever doing so, apparently I usually wake up instead of going into REM and all those minutes “awake” usually average an hour) so I either need to go to bed earlier or wake up later and neither of those things are going to happen.

No progblog last week because I caught a “flu-like virus” and got a bonus chest infection. Not recommended.

On the bright side, the first day I was finally able to work, it took only a couple of goes for my hand to suddenly decide it had finally figured out how to draw the scales and they got done relatively quickly compared to my previous struggles. The last bit of the tail took the longest as the scales obviously had to shrink with the body. Also, it seems to be a given that the last 20% of anything takes up 80% of the total time spent on it.

Any given number of steps backwards.

Even though I’d repeatedly told 10yo not to start the quest in Habitica til 12yo and I were back from our respective jaunts, apparently he couldn’t resist pressing the button. So after we’d died a few times (mostly thanks to me as I have the biggest lists) I finally managed to scrape some stuff together enough to start working through my todo list (which I haven’t updated outside of Trello but probably should). If I can get it properly together I’ll start jumping the quick stuff like I used to but currently my brain seems incapable so just plodding along in order it is.

Happy 100th birthday, Nanny. Hope you’re having a great celebration up there and heard us singing to you from all the way down here.

(The pictured cake I think was meant to be the actual birthday cake, and we ate it at the wake, we’ve been back in Perth for a week now and had a small dinner party at Aunty L’s with Perth Nanny, my parents, Sprat, and Dad’s youngest brother and his family and a sujee cake with 10 big candles on it and sent photos to Uncle C in Melbourne)

So, not long ago in the grand scheme I found out one of my friends has breast cancer. There is another skinhead mohawk pending once I get a moment. More recently my grandmother died. It’s sad but she was just shy of 100 so it wasn’t unexpected. Tomorrow I’m on a plane to Melbourne, and will be home on Saturday. This is mostly heads up that there may or may not be a progblog next weekend depending on how I’m feeling.