This weekend was busier than usual with 13yo and 11yo having states. Both of them did pretty well, 11yo got a silver on beam (level 5 is tough!) and 13yo got silver on pommel and rings and gold on floor and parallel bars as well as second in All Around. Now there’s just end of year stuff to go! 11yo has been busy at fornightly dance rehearsals as she’s in the opening performance for the end of year concert. Now I just hope it doesn’t clash with the gymnastics end of year display!

I’m still editing week before’s Wednesday streaming and have to start on last week’s, ideally before I do this week’s but cutting music is hard. Getting rid of all the pauses and timelapsing the video is easy. The yellow composite layer in the screenie is only there because for whatever reason the preview skips and stutters and carries on when there’s a title clip, I should be able to remove it before rendering. If I didn’t have a plan which involved trying o accumulate a couple of steem for the Hayrunners project, I’m not sure that I would post this. Maybe it might be interesting if you like watching flats very slowly getting depth added despite being spend up 2000%? It just seems kind of boring after watching the more fun and dynamic drawings that spodey and scrawly have been posting videos of.

Only a very slight one though. This is the first of four panels on that rather large songpic that escaped from my head (that obnoxious white line on the left is the frame border). Think I’ve levelled up or at least gained a lot of xp with shadowing as normally I still need the lineart layer after light and shadow 1 but it’s currently off, guess dark scenes are good for something XD (or maybe I should just not be so afraid of the shadow layers in day scenes).

Small victory for having made all the progblogs last month! We’ve had awesome fun times with everyone in the house except me (so far touch wood aargh) succumbing to this rather awful gastro over the course of the week, so in fairness not quite as much done as I would have liked to do (even though I whined about my glacial speed at the time), but slow progress is better than no progress!

I needed a break from technical stuff, so I started sculpting Zara. I don’t know why I always start with eyebrows, I just do, so I did the eyebrows, but then deviated from my usual of going down the nose and doing the face and bounced over to doing the ears. Probably because hers are a bit pointy. The point is tricky as the Avians have an obvious point but their ears aren’t nearly as big as the Dragonkin ears. She doesn’t look like anyone yet but we’ll get there, hopefully in less time than it took to do Red as she’s got the standard amount of limbs and I don’t completely suck at retopo and uv unwrapping anymore (even though I still don’t like either of them XD).

Today was the last day of regionals at our gym, there were three rounds of level 3s, then 11yo and I stayed to help reset the gym back to normal for training for states in ~4 weeks. I’m feeling kind of pathetic as after guarding doors for two weekends and helping move heavy equipment everything from the back down are pretty sore (okay in hindsight it was probably stupid to lift the big p-bars by myself but I have good stances, maybe not as good as Zip’s but all I had to do was lift each end in turn so the floor protectors could be put under the feet) and…apparently while I can still use my hands for typing and poking at touch screens, I can’t draw. Well I can but working on @f3nix’s piece is taking way more concentration than it should.

And hopefully I’m not going to have any more backwards steps as I’m thoroughly over them! Our club is hosting regionals so weekend just gone has been extremely busy (hence why progblog is late) and there is another one is coming up next weekend which will hopefully be not quite as busy. With luck I’ll have this week’s progblog done on time, but it depends on whether we need to help set up on Friday night (as I tend to make progblogs on Friday nights, I do try to post them then as well but it can end up being sometime on the weekend if I don’t finish on time.

You only need one other person for a party right? XD I’d settled down to work on poor f3nix’s avatar (poor because they’ve been waiting ages for it! I’m so sorry!) but there was something wrong with my hand. Lineart was excessively slow and shaky, I kept having to redo lines constantly and despite drawing over both a sketch and having the base available (though it was broken as I had a set of bases that just wouldn’t render correctly for some reason) I could not for the life of me get my hand to cooperate or certain bits to look right.

Zul’jinn had seen the water fight starting as he’d been swimming in from his wingboarding lesson with Mu’tai, and it was in full swing by the time he got to his chosen vantage point, comfortably chest deep in the pleasantly cool turquoise water. Anyone could be easily forgiven for thinking there was a severe mismatch going on between the combatants; comprising of the whiplike Avian Saun’de with the pocket rocket half-Avian Zara perched easily on his shoulders, versus the intimidating bulk of the Dragonkin Kae’lin with the buff Damian precariously and awkwardly balanced atop his.

Obviously, I haven’t done uv mapping for a while. Last time was three years ago (jeez I’m so slow aargh it’s too late for me save yourselves). So while I remembered how they worked and seem to have gotten better at actually making/unwrwapping them, I managed to completely forget what they were. So when I was setting up the paint object, I automatically selected the largest they had available (16k), because in Krita I always paint on 16bit canvases.