If it's not PvZ I've been distracted by steem, oops :S And I haven't even been wandering off my not-that-busy feed, I just have this bad habit of commenting on most of the things I upvote ^_^;

Finally finished the phoenix tattoo! Well I'm pretty sure it's finished anyway, I've dropped shadow layers on the body and the froof and after some playing around decided the wings and tail feathers don't need shadowing.

So there I was, making some excellent headway on the wings, when I broke my photo library.  Actually I'm not sure what I did  to it, I have to write August homeschool miscellany (which I will probably combine with September homeschool miscellany depending on how many photos I end up pulling out of September) and Digikam was giving me grief so I decided to import the photos with Shotwell.

That went fine til I noticed it was pulling in photos from the beginning of the year as "new" and seemed to be giving them the wrong creation dates, so I stopped that one quickly and went to finish the import with Digikam.

Which seemed to just stop on a fail (it wasn't frozen as I could still cancel the operation and use the program afterwards).

My work day got cut short due to some shenanigans (the big kids have this weird cold thing where they're awful and stuffy and letahrgic in the morning but it improves as the temperatures rise, which means school child refused to go to school and I was dropping her in late, and then there was a boring routine doctor appointment) and due to further shenanigans the day after (J had the day off and the kids decided to be stroppy including further school refusal from the kid who apparently loves school).

I am so glad it's school holidays as I seriously loathe the school run.

And the night that I'm supposed to be progblogging in, we (happily and voluntarily) stayed to help rearrange the gym as the lights are getting fixed/replaced and we needed to move everything out of the way so whoever's doing all the roofworks could put scaffolding in.

It's also comp weekend.

I'm only apologising for the late progblog out of habit as I'm not sure how many people read these things XD I've really got to kick the habit of working in the time slot that's supposed to be for writing the progblog.  It's misplaced guilt from feeling bad about not having "enough" progress from the last progblog so I try to have more to show because I've taken so long obsessing over details and making sure things are perfect.  This is why I'm never going to be able to get an industry job.

Like the most recent silliness.  The wings were uneven.

I'd been trying really hard to ignore it for ages because I don't think anyone else would notice given how the tattoo wraps around  the arm.  This proved impossible, so I redid it.

It's probably a good thing I'm fairly used to chaos, and also that we didn't actually need to fly anywhere in a hurry.

It took me four goes to get the kids' passports renewed (and this isn't even mentioning the chaos and confusion trying to tee up with my friend who agreed to be their guarantor).  Fortunately the post office I was using is less than 10min drive from my place and the lady who processes the applications is very good-natured and patient.

As per usual, it ate my art time.  I did manage to finally get all the primaries done.

Which is not nearly as entertaining or interesting as the states of the @nonameslefttouse addresses.

After ages of trying I've finally come to the conclusion that I can't make enough progress fast enough for a Patreon to be worthwhile to most people, and also there were some little niggly things that were bothering me, so I've partially shut it down (deleted my pledges to other creators and "unlaunched" my creator page but haven't deleted the account yet, I may either do that or relaunch down the line, will see what happens).

So I'm down to just ko-fi and crypto in my pathetic attempts to make money doing my thing.

Because like I ever do anything quickly.

So after making some good headway on the tail feathers from last progblog, I eventually realised (again why could I not do this earlier) that they weren't flowing with the arm direction and when the arm bent the feathers around the elbow were doing to kink horribly.  Not only that the flow of the tail feathers didn't make much sense given the overall shape of the phoenix.

Suppose that's what I get for trying for a cute fancy spray when the whole thing is a much more boring but much better flowing elongated S.

Perhaps it's a good thing that JJ walks around with headphones on whenever he's home and that the kids are just used to my weirdness as pretty much everyone else would probably have gone slightly insane at the sheer number of times I've been listening to True Colours by Artists Against Bullying (linked to a sign language one because it was adorable, this is the official clip and here's the original Cyndi Lauper one that they covered) and Here I Am by Bryan Adams (again linked to a Spirit one because I'm still not sure what to make of the original XD).

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!)

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.