Didn't take too long to get my hand in, so once I figured out what I was doing it happened reasonably quick (but not as quick as I would have liked partly because it's been a week and mostly because I have unrealistic and generally unachievable expectations of myself).
Decided to do the tail feathers by colour instead of individually and the barby bits are kind of painstaking because the brush is tinier than 3dC wants to deal with, but we're glacially getting there.
So, not long ago in the grand scheme I found out one of my friends has breast cancer. There is another skinhead mohawk pending once I get a moment. More recently my grandmother died. It's sad but she was just shy of 100 so it wasn't unexpected. Tomorrow I'm on a plane to Melbourne, and will be home on Saturday. This is mostly heads up that there may or may not be a progblog next weekend depending on how I'm feeling.
Progress-wise, well. With the scales I was really going out of my way to avoid drawing them. I figured once I got the hang of the scale brush everything would be sweet. Well I decided eventually that I would just see what drawing them would look like.
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).
Also I didn't visibly progress as much as I wanted. As far as the work is concerned well I'd love to tell you how any times my perfectionist tendency has kicked my sorry tail to the kerb repeatedly (aka I kept redoing the thing because I wasn't happy with something or other and because of how the scales intersect it was really hard just to remove the section that was causing the problem) but I've long since lost count.
I started on an engagement present for @jedau on Wednesday, and decided to continue it on Thursday so of course it got streamed.
Did something slightly different, instead of just cutting a piece out of each track as usual, I axed anything that wasn't sappy, upbeat, uplifting or didn't have lyrics I could use and used slightly longer samples than otherwise. The first and last tracks are still the first and last tracks (and in fact the first track was the inspiration for the piece as well as what I thought of when I read Jed's dramatised recount of the proposal to his girlfriend). The ending is rather abrupt because I was pretty tired by that point and my computer was playing silly buggers.
Track list:
@jedau over on Steemit took a bit of a shine to Aurelius in the Black Fingernails Red Wine piece due to name similarities, and these gems came up in the course of our conversation:
Haha! Definitely make him look like a Quokka :D
And
Oh right!! They're native to Australia haha! Man, I wish I had those things as pets haha! Maybe add in a scar across Aurelius left eye to give him that sort of intimidating presence. When people ask how he got it, he'll think of some awesome story, when really it was because he slipped while getting a midnight snack and hit his face on the corner wall.
Do you have any idea whatsoever how impossible it is to make a quokka look intimidating? Even when they're a therio? It's that nose. I can't work under these conditions! XD
This MerMay thing (whatever it is XD) gave a good enough excuse to draw examples of the Selkies and Nereids as they appear in the AER-verse (examples because they vary massively in appearance depending on...a lot of things). I attempted a more "stereotypical" mermaid here which meant it's either an early Nereid or a reef/shallow water Nereid. The ones that live in shallow water are more likely to resemble Base humans. The ones that live out in the deep sea only bear hints that they evolved from humans.
The Selkies usually have the cetacean/seal traits such as horizontal tails and breathe air. Nereids have more fish/aquatic animal tendencies such as gills (which uses the existing nose structures with modifications for the shallow water ones and gill slits in the deeper water ones) and vertical tails and an abundance of fins (though this one only has a fin on the head).
Apparently there's a thing called MerMay going on where people are trying to draw merfolk this month. Seemed as good an excuse as any to draw a Selkie as they are in the AER-verse.
While sculpting horns I was quite sure I was going to use Blender for all the sculpty goodness seeing as it had actually imported the mesh to begin with. I think I'm going to have to accept the fact that my brain is never going to play nicely with Blender because even though I have been doing so much better than I ever have, I still don't understand it.
Very roughly positioned front, side and three-quarter view of the character in a window on the 21" monitor. The actual work was being done on the Cintiq at close range. The multiscreening is one seriously cool thing about Blender and I do miss it a little bit in Sculptris
I have a "family tree" in MacFamilyTree which contains a lot of family saplings as it contains every named major and minor character and several unnamed but otherwise important ones (such as parents of siblings, as you need to list parents to be able to link people up as siblings). The main part of the family tree seems to be tracing The Art from Taha'ne through Ter'wyn down to My'rai (currently the last descendant on the list, the character is about 8-10 in my head in his current state and I also have an idea of him as a teenager but only have snippets of story for him) which is rather entertaining as there is 1723 years between them. That's a lot of characters even given that the Dragonkin live an average of 120 years.
