technonaturalist

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).

October started out with 11yo’s bestie staying for the weekend and them asking if we could wander around Perth for a bit after visiting a store they wanted to browse. 9yo requested my phone to take a couple of photos of things that interested him:

The city has been trying to do more fun and interesting stuff so we tend to find random things whenever we go there. At the time they were celebrating the arrival of spring so there were these random bird cages there, which were apparently great for photoshoots.

Yeh yeh I’m late again. Much shenanigans happened on the weekend taking 11yo, a bunch of her giggly friends and 13yo to Bounce (9yo was meant to come to but he’d sliced his toe open on Thursday by deciding it was imperative that his iPad be unlocked on the way to the car rather than in the car after he’d clipped in and thus he didn’t notice the kerb I’d parked next to), and then one of the girls stayed over (which I found out was happening on the day, fortunately I’m cruisy).

I progressed!

Zara has been turned into a paint object and I really should have done her nails first but I got excited and launched straight into tattoos. They ended up looking slightly different from my reference pic (where everything was pretty much guesswork anyway).

I missed two aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyway. I’m currently stuck with the dance animation because the characters didn’t end up where I wanted them to be due to a severely truncated tumble run.

I originally planned for Zara to do a proper diagonal with at least a slight run-up and 4-5 tricks. Then I had a problem of Rei’s tumble run being not nearly as long because she’s just learning and doesn’t know nearly as many tricks as Zara, plus she does a slower and more graceful one that doesn’t utilise a run up.

And that’s pretty much the extent of this progblog XD

This week has been pretty slow on all fronts. 9yo had a cold again so we couldn’t go out and do much, so we just chilled and reconnected, which of course meant not much work getting done. It also wasn’t helped by having to make a hundred million phone calls to government departments. I don’t do phones so it was exhausting and I had to go hide for a little while afterwards. I did get some villainous upgoats done, but even though I made some big swatches it didn’t occur to me that I’d end up with a foxgoat til after I’d done it. Sigh.