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.

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.

No story for this one as it would never happen because Jinn would never willingly do something so dangerous XD (I do have a scene where he has to dive after Zara when she jumps off a building to escape from Red, but that was out of necessity) The idea for this came about after listening to the song “Rewrite the Stars” from The Greatest Showman: I actually wanted to animate it and ironically probably could have animated it in the ridiculous amount of time it took me to do the comicky layout and all the associatedwork…IF I’d had the models ready to go which I don’t yet and that’s what I’m going to be getting stuck back into. Also need to fix up some stuff with the base models (mostly the shape of the hands and shorten slightly-too-long legs) and do the texture tests I want to do aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I got to the last frame! And then the proverbial excrement impacted the thermantidote. Earlier, we’d finall found a house that everyone really liked, so we’d popped an offer on, put our house on the market and started making plans. Of course, some idiot then decided they absolutely had to have it at all costs and they were able to make an unconditional offer so we were forced to withdraw by a clause in the contract which we hadn’t been particularly worried about because the house had been sitting on the market for over a hundred days and we figured if anyone had been interested it would have gone by now.

I needed a day to work on a birthday present for my favourite sibling. Prior to that, here’s about where I was up to. Zul’jinn is done, working on Zara. These ones are pretty quick as they’re tiny. The lighting is a pain though, I don’t think it’s right but currently not sure how to fix it and I’m more interested in finishing and posting it so I can try to next slog through those boring texture tests I have to do. I’m still trying to get a close look at Zara’s tattoos, I was really hoping that it would turn out to be skin on the dragon as that would make my life so much easier but nope scales. Least they look pretty. I think the dragon has chicken legs at least which will make the scaling down them that little bit easier, the transitions are kind of doing my head in. Now all I need to work out is if it’s a mane or a dorsal spine sail fin thing down the back.

I fell so far off the track I’m not sure I’ll be able to find it again, maybe it was a cliff I plummeted off? Who thought building a railroad through this kind of territory was a good idea? Guess I’ll just have to make yet another one. Again. There’s probably a perfectly good plain not far away that would have made for a much easier journey too. In tonight’s work in progress shot I’m working on shadow 3 of frame 4, featuring my scribbly placeholder writing which was laid out before I knew that I was going to do this twisty perspective run on nightmarish thing with the buildings. The first two frames/sections went more or less according to plan and then after the third frame I’ve been changing text placement on the fly. It’s been working out so far.

I honestly did not mean to go this long without producing a progblog :| I have the excuse of being on Christmas Island, hanging with family and absolutely not enjoying the experience of working on my Surface Pro (I hate Windows) in January. In February I just totally and completely fell off the rails. 12yo deciding to do high school has basically removed 5 hours in the week that I was using to work. I got really, really stressed out to the point of it was going to get real bad real quick so I decided I really needed to do some art therapy, and went for something stupid and fluffy because it was the complete opposite of how I was feeling. It ended up being a songpic and as much hard work as Embers. I wasn’t feeling up to a progblog (and at that stage didn’t realise I had fallen back into the old habit of “well I haven’t made any worthwhile progress so I don’t want to bore anyone”) to posted a sneekypeeky to Patreon to try to make up for it.

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).

I progressed! Zara has been turned into a paint object and I really should have done her nails first but I got excited and launched straight into tattoos. They ended up looking slightly different from my reference pic (where everything was pretty much guesswork anyway).

And that’s pretty much the extent of this progblog XD This week has been pretty slow on all fronts. 9yo had a cold again so we couldn’t go out and do much, so we just chilled and reconnected, which of course meant not much work getting done. It also wasn’t helped by having to make a hundred million phone calls to government departments. I don’t do phones so it was exhausting and I had to go hide for a little while afterwards. I did get some villainous upgoats done, but even though I made some big swatches it didn’t occur to me that I’d end up with a foxgoat til after I’d done it. Sigh.