technonaturalist

As February was ending I suspected Term 1 was going to be a write-off for the boys and unfortunately I wasn’t wrong. An additional and unforeseen problem with the school run was that even though it’s short it seems to be further destroying my problem shoulder, so I really didn’t want to drive anywhere, which given the time restrictions caused by school and the amount of pain I was in basically meant we got stuck with the Scitech homeschooling lessons I’d booked at the beginning of term, and me imposing 10am-12noon as “no non-educational videos and games” time if we were staying home. They could still use their screens but had to be doing Khan Academy or making something, or doing any off-screen activities.

Almost fell into old habits of not posting because I’m currently stuck in November as far as progress on stuff I was supposed to be working on (before getting massively sidetracked by the Rewrite the Stars songpic).

Now I had actually gotten a fair way further than this and was doing pretty all right when I realised two things.

February was confusing.

I thought I had everything worked out. I was going to show 12yo how to get to and from high school for a couple of weeks, then cut her a key and leave her to it and just continue as normal with the boys.

I didn’t realise a) that this would be tiring and b) that 12yo kept insisting on being accompanied past the two weeks and both her and JJ were having epic freakouts about “what if she gets on the wrong bus” on the way home, as the bus route couldn’t be easy and just reverse, the opposite route goes in a different direction. I had told 12yo how to get back to the main road and where would be safe to cross and which bus numbers to take, but anyway.

I got to the last frame!

And then the proverbial excrement impacted the thermantidote.

Earlier, we’d finall found a house that everyone really liked, so we’d popped an offer on, put our house on the market and started making plans. Of course, some idiot then decided they absolutely had to have it at all costs and they were able to make an unconditional offer so we were forced to withdraw by a clause in the contract which we hadn’t been particularly worried about because the house had been sitting on the market for over a hundred days and we figured if anyone had been interested it would have gone by now.

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.

Zul’jinn is done, working on Zara. These ones are pretty quick as they’re tiny. The lighting is a pain though, I don’t think it’s right but currently not sure how to fix it and I’m more interested in finishing and posting it so I can try to next slog through those boring texture tests I have to do. I’m still trying to get a close look at Zara’s tattoos, I was really hoping that it would turn out to be skin on the dragon as that would make my life so much easier but nope scales. Least they look pretty. I think the dragon has chicken legs at least which will make the scaling down them that little bit easier, the transitions are kind of doing my head in. Now all I need to work out is if it’s a mane or a dorsal spine sail fin thing down the back.

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.

In tonight’s work in progress shot I’m working on shadow 3 of frame 4, featuring my scribbly placeholder writing which was laid out before I knew that I was going to do this twisty perspective run on nightmarish thing with the buildings. The first two frames/sections went more or less according to plan and then after the third frame I’ve been changing text placement on the fly. It’s been working out so far.

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.

In February I just totally and completely fell off the rails. 12yo deciding to do high school has basically removed 5 hours in the week that I was using to work. I got really, really stressed out to the point of it was going to get real bad real quick so I decided I really needed to do some art therapy*, *and went for something stupid and fluffy because it was the complete opposite of how I was feeling. It ended up being a songpic and as much hard work as Embers. I wasn’t feeling up to a progblog (and at that stage didn’t realise I had fallen back into the old habit of “well I haven’t made any worthwhile progress so I don’t want to bore anyone”) to posted a sneekypeeky to Patreon to try to make up for it.

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

We got to watch the derpy little thrushes fledging, slowly learn how to fly, hop around the garden still demanding food from and getting fed by their parent, and hopefully eventually soaring off to start their own lives.

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.

The appearance of the steamed sausages wasn’t particularly well received by the 9yo, and it was noted that the flavours and textures differed with the different cooking methods. 13yo also decided he was going to start applying for jobs when we got back to Perth.

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

We weren’t completely lazy. The boys played with the snap circuits, 13yo mostly building his own. 9yo experimenting with food (in the picture he was doing arty things with strawberries and cream before consuming them), and 11yo was mostly experimenting with and learning about makeup (and spending a lot of money on it).