Common confusion

Amusement while I was walking the dog.

When you’re somewhat androgynous, this is a thing that happens frequently. I enjoy it way too much.

Especially when there are small children who are too young to realise some questions are apparently “inappropriate” and flat out ask me “are you a boy or a girl?” and I’ll usually answer something along the lines of it either/or, doesn’t really bother me, depends on the day, or if I’m feeling particularly playful, tell them I’m undecided that day and maybe they could suggest something. It’s even funnier when their parents are around as some of them are absolutely mortified and start apologising profusely (I have to find it funny because otherwise trying to make them understand that I literally don’t care would be frustrating).

The Witchies

Once upon a time, not so very long ago in the grand scheme, two of my friends and I got together in a group chat which apparently needed a name, so I called it “witchies” as there was a bit of the Triple Goddess vibe with our respective age gaps, at least partly influenced with how the director portrayed the three witches in a *Macbeth *I acted in way back at uni. I said once I felt good enough I was going to draw us all as witchies.

August ProgBlog #2: all the small things

An unbelievable amount of crazy has been happening.

Comp season starting was just part of it (aka there went one weekend, spoiler alert 12yo did well).

We’re now onto the last few tail feathers with the pink and purple.

Close up of the middle feathers (which shows I need to cover more grey in the purple section!)

Scale issues

See what I have to put up with?

See what my poor family have to put up with? XD

I’m having scale issues in both senses of the word. For whatever reason, when importing a model from Blender, it’s microscopic in 3dC. What I did with Red was to just enlarge the model til it was big enough to work on, then send it back, where it was (strangely) way, way, way too big in Blender (I think he was close to 1km high before I resized him). Then it didn’t help that the vertices were apparently somehow too close together for the auto weight mapping so I had to enlarge it again just enough for that to work (because manually weight mapping rigs from the outset is the definition of tedious) and then shrink it agan.

June ProgBlog #2: in the green

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.

June ProgBlog #1

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).

May ProgBlog #2: I am STILL FALLING!

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.

May ProgBlog #1: one step forward

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.

External stressors

His skin stung and his ears echoed with a painful, high pitched noise that was taking its sweet time subsiding.

Why? Why had he used self destruct?

He didn’t want to look, but he had to know. Carefully, he opened his eyes.

Blackness. His already rapidly beating heart attempted evacuation out of his mouth. Was he blind? Had he not shielded his face in time? Pinpricks of light seared his eyeballs, and thankfully the blackness lifted, revealing the impact crater the force of the explosion had left on the battlefield. Song’s sore eyes darted around his side of the field.

Pokemon: I Choose You!

A couple of years ago (eep!) I started doing sketchies of starter pokemon I either chose or would have chosen. Part of the reason was to keep trying to do this “warm up sketch” idea I kept reading about (it doesn’t seem to work for me) and another part was trying to post daily on steem (I failed, and given how tiring it was I started advising especially new artists to make a post schedule if they wanted to maintain some semblance of routine but not to try daily, and given how many people burned out trying I keep advising this).