October ProgBlog #3: geared up

UASG

Spent today trying to catch up with the last couple of weekend’s worth of work and I have now almost completed the three main items that Yue carries around with her (partly because they’re things that she uses very regularly and mostly because they’re kind of a security blanket).

First is the airfoil, which is a sword when folded up:

and a giant fan that she can both fight with and glide on (skaterpunk Yue’s skateboard wasn’t going to work in an airship setting, and I went with a variation of the Talespin “airfoil” rather than the slightly more sensical Avatar: The Last Airbender glider partly because ridiculous steampunk anime, partly keeping some aspects of Skaterpunk Yue and mostly because I hate staff x_x).

October ProgBlog #2: the stupid things I do

I still do too many stupid things to count. This is just one of them.

No not that in particular, that’s just my attempt at approximating Chinese brush painting (I have exactly no idea so I watched some tutorials, and I still have no idea). The *actual *stupid thing is this.

That at the top is a copy of my rough sketch (the original has been turned off on the upside down one) and I’m going to repaint it. Because Yue’s airfoil has the same design painted on both sides but as they would have been painted independently rather than the cheat way of just rotating the image like a sensible person would do, that’s what I’m doing for accuracy -_-

October ProgBlog #1: Toolsday

So, with the sheer volume of stuff happening on the weekend (work, training and roleplaying), it will probably come as a surprise to exactly no one that I’m struggling to get progblogs out on those days.

Additionally despite knowing from a ridiculous amount of previous experience that it leads to burnout and intense slowdown at best (I can feel how slow I’m moving and it’s annoying me no end) and downtime at worst, I cut into sleep time again because it’s the easiest thing to cut x_x

August ProgBlog #3: where did that week go?

It was starting and I had plans and then other stuff happened and I just kind of tried to deal with things (generally failing) so kind of just buried into music (generally looping my project playlists) and did stuff (not nearly as much as I wanted, yeh I know that’s the usual story, but it’s even less done than usual as brain is not functioning correctly at the moment, I borked) and then suddenly it was the weekend.

August ProgBlog #2: stalls and tools

It’s been a few weeks.

And then I finally got around to writing this thing, and was making some half-decent progress (while chatting to sibling dearest in our inaugural hopefully weekly project chat and progressing some other stuff as well) and then had one of those infuriating semi-frequent crashes that refuses under any circumstances to be diagnosed (it’s probably hardware because there is literally nothing that I am doing that can reproduce them reliably).

August ProgBlog #1: branching out

The scales are still going. The only thing that’s changed is that I’m now in the yellow PURPLE section! XD

And I realised after actually looking at ko-fi that I haven’t updated for over two weeks, oops x_x (I only paid attention because they said they were letting gold members trial the tiers and that I had early access to be able to provide feedback, it was supposed to be for gold members but I’m not one so I guess there was either a slow rollout or a trial group, either way it seems to be open for everyone now). Part of the reason for that is because I was doing very short update posts on Tuesday which has now changed to working on something else day (other project or cameos which I really need to get back to as well) and I quite often will work on the Fridays til really late before I actually do and post the progblog (Friday being my designated progblog posting day) so after I’ve posted it I usually just go to bed (because it’s between midnight and 2am by then) and then forget to update when I wake up again.

July ProgBlog #3: why does it have to be scales

Once again, doing a bit more work on character portraits than 3d, because my brain just doesn’t want to deal with the scales. I eventually decided to keep my character consistent with the other ones (Captain Gundry and Bricky Steve) rather than doing the different headshots (partly because I’m kind of designing the outfit and the “weapon” which isn’t an actual weapon, just something she uses to beat people up with when she isn’t riding around on it, on the fly and mostly because it is going to take the better part of forever if I do it that way, now at least I have some idea of when I might finish).

July ProgBlog #2: tedium

There has not been a lot of progress this week, partly because I felt quite inspired by Sunday’s roleplaying game and ended up working on character portraits instead,

and mostly because I’m hand drawing the dragon scales -_-

Started off with the belly scales like

and then got bored so ended up doing the entire spine/mane/fin/I don’t even know what it is anymore. But I’m still angsting about whether the purple mane is okay as is or if I should be making it a full face beard as a lot of the references I’m looking at do.

Bricky Steve

Bricky Steve is 16yo’s friend’s (aka “the other 16yo”) player character, a mage who accidentally created a “perfect brick” (known as “The Ubrick” as they portmanteaud uber brick) and is now on a mission to try and recreate it, and thus developed an obsession with bricks. It’s only us players that seem to call him Bricky Steve, he’s just “Steve” to the other characters.

He lives and works on Captain Gundry’s airship and seeems to be maintenance personnel more than anything (he’s spec’d mental/social/physical) as in the last session he stayed on board with Gundry and Yue while everyone else (including 16yo’s character) raided another ship, and did a lot of magic repairs to the balloon when their ship came under Umbral attack.

July ProgBlog #1: tattoo artistry

I’ve always had a great respect for tattoo artists. I may or may not have mentioned the first time I did these tattoos that that respect increased by roughly an order of magnitude because unlike me they don’t have undo buttons. And somehow can make things look good from most angles. I’m really feeling that again.

Also despite having had to do it for this version I still don’t understand how people paint from colour blocks.