Crowd Cameo: mousey smallsteps

@tarazkp requested a cameo of young @smallsteps as a mouse (because she loves being a mouse).

I don’t have child proportioned bases yet so there was an entertaining round of contorting an adult sized base and then after sketching over in Krita, the transform tool got a good workout.

My butterfly (companion of the upgoat) made a cameo (with different shaped wings).

Back to using my favourite sketch shading brush (it’s working how I remember it working again now, guess more changes and improvements have been made to the brush engine), and I’m probably going to use the impasto brush for more backgrounds too, it was a lot of fun.

January ProgBlog #3: not quite there yet

I’m still on an awkward “holiday” schedule (which is as similar as I could make it to the term schedule working around a holiday program that’s running at the moment). I’m still going to bed late and getting up early and really do have to nix that immediately because the memory issues are back in force and I have very definitely slowed down.

I’ve been up late making sure roleplaying stuff is sorted out because that’s a thing that happens every weekend. And I also have to actually check CoD character sheets because I’m not familiar enough with the system yet to be able to glance and go yep looks right like I can with WoD.

January ProgBlog #2: reworked schedules

There’s only multiple schedules because I have multiple people that I need to work with/around.

With some assistance from sibling dearest which she started off for me like

I ended up with something that I’m going to be testing and tweaking for a little while til I know what (if anything) needs adjusting or something changes enough to require changing up.

January ProgBlog #1: mediocre starts

I was intending on trying to get back into the swing of things in the first week of January (including my blogging schedule) with the intention of seeing what in the work schedule that I’d done up (and been vaguely reworking on the fly) needed changing up.

I didn’t end up doing the progblog and the work schedule really does need changing up.

Though most of what I suffer from is the complete inability to keep to anything resembling time, and the fact that I have to be interruptable because JJ is the one with the full time job with defined hours. So what I had was just stuff that needed to get done on what day, and just doing what I could when I could.

And as you feel the notes build you will see

Happy New Year!

Listen to the song XD

I feel bad for poor Dak, I have trouble figuring out how to shade dark skin at the best of times and dark scenes are the worst x_x I did actually start a different version of this piece on Christmas Eve but it was very sadsack (the theme song for that was Blow Up the Pokies by The Whitlams) and was basically Zara staring up at the stars being depresso (she gets depressed every Intercalary which contains AER’s New Year as she misses her mother more then) and Juan in the near background trying to work out how to deal with things (he kind of got thrown violently in at the deep end with the parenting gig) while I wallowed about how much Christmas sucked this year.

December ProgBlog #3: "Christmas holidays"

Yeh right like I ever take them.

I have seriously been moving like molasses and I really do need to actually change something, but because I’m me I’ll probably just burnout again, have to recover for a few days again during which I’ll relentlessly beat myself up over being an idiot again and that I really should have fixed it before it became this bad again, only to do exactly the same thing down the line again.

December ProgBlog #2: less ramp, more ramp, less prog

The last major gymnastics event for the year is over, which took a lot of pressure off.

I finished the photobooks, more pressure off.

Then stuff happened with made things ramp up again, and it got so bad that I deliberately didn’t do some mental health stuff that would have helped the frame of mind I fell into because there is literally absolutely no point whatsoever, because I’m wrong and everyone else is right and that’s all there is to it no matter what.

December ProgBlog #1: ramp

Stuff is ramping up.

I’ve been mostly working on photobooks trying to get them done in time for printing and shipping back to the island in the vain hopes it might not get there too late. I’ve also been working on my dice system (it has undergone two major overhauls in about as many days) and roleplaying notes (gained a bit of extra time as the kids didn’t feel like playing the weekend just gone, I brought the stuff over anyway just in case I actually needed it but got to just hang with my friend the entire time).

November ProgBlog #5: kinda rage

I should probably start going to bed earlier as I’m constantly tired and staying up late trying to cram more work in doesn’t seem to be working. But I keep doing it because I feel bad about not getting a lot done. It’s a vicious perpetual cycle.

I’m also feeling bad because it was my last day at work today, I’ve just found out someone else at the centre is dropping because of the vaccine mandate. I don’t know what’s going to happen with their program, they were the only one running it. There’s been interesting conversations and sometimes I’m wondering if the people claiming “I get it, I really do!” after I’ve explained my reasoning to them do actually “get it” (in fairness some really do even if they made a different decision, and others are really, really struggling with the fact that after considering essentially the same information, how other people could possibly have come to the “wrong” decision). Work is also now severely understaffed and my boss is stressing which is making me stress because I like my boss and there isn’t a right thing to do.

November ProgBlog #2: distractions

There are many and some of them are just things I’ve decided to add on because I’m not very smart like that.

After WoDMod1 finished I started hacking on a dice system I’d written for AER two decades ago x_x when I was roleplaying a lot more. It mostly worked out fine when I was playtesting it with the friends I roleplayed with frequently back then because it was a fork of World of Darkness with a lot of my fudges and homebrew built in (it’s actually more or less the system I run now when we’re playing World of Darkness, just closer to the original than my fork so the children reading the sourcebooks know what’s going on).