July ProgBlog #4: eternal scales

I feel like I've been doing this forever.

Have I mentioned how much I didn't want to be doing this again?

On the bright side it is at least organised a lot better this time even if it's probably overkill as far as textures are concerned, and I hope it looks better, and I'm about two thirds of the way through the yellow so I'm approaching halfway?

This is going to carry on for a while.

I haven't been able to work a lot this week as sibling dearest has been up and we have been hanging out and shopping almost non-stop (or more accurately sibling dearest has been shopping almost non-stop and I've been pack muling almost non-stop). Shops are exhausting. Not the actual shopping trip (which is a relatively short walk, though the Fitbit reckons we somehow did the most sedate 8km I've ever done today) or the hanging out with sibling dearest (which I love), just the shops with their crowds and their noise and the too much going on for my meagre brain to handle.

This trip up she asked me to bully her into working on her webcomic project and one night she was over I did that and progress was made. I think we might try to do a regular project chat and bully/encourage each other along and hopefully production will step up that little bit more.

The scale drawing is coming a bit easier now that my hand is used to drawing the scale shape again and also now that I've managed to convince myself to stop trying to make each scale exactly the same shape and soothing myself that I will be able to fix most of the problems I can see/am causing with my inability to draw in the shading/gloss map and the fact the camera is unlikely to ever get as close as I'm getting. If I'm not too distracted trying to finish a certain character portrait over the weekend I'll try to smash more out.

Speaking of character portrait, that was going great though I got irritated by my incredible slowness at drawing again and decided that I would be photobashing the fox forms after all.

Here's how the whole thing is looking so far.

I'm trying to just quietly let things go because anime logic but me being me I'm struggling a bit with the tails in that outfit. Maybe she just has a similar looking outfit with a tail hole for when she's in Koto (and Sambuhenge I guess, apparently canonically the Kitsune don't really like using that form) as I'm pretty sure they're generally in crinos form for Beast Courts, and she's really not a dress type (though previous version was put in one before much to her annoyance).

I have no idea what I'm doing with that airfoil, mostly because it doesn't make any logical sense to begin with and I need to 3d it properly to see how it works. In the meantime I'm dashing fold lines into it because my initial design failed miserably (I found this out while shading of course) and trying to do even the lightest weighted lines was too in your face, but seems that just shading the fan shape is also not an option (I did try).

I was also trying to vaguely emulate the character sheet and make them roughly the same scale (unlike the other Changing Breeds who have massive crinos forms, the Kitsune don't really change size much and the crinos/Koto form is only slightly bigger than the other forms) but some dumbarse (not me at all >_>) decided to open the stupid airfoil for the Koto form and it was too big and I'll have to either shrink the other two or just ignore the scale and just make each "frame" (because the black lines are guides that won't actually be in the final) work on their own. As the fox form is tiny (because Fennec foxes seem to be ankle height) and wouldn't take up enough of its square I am going to do the latter.

I'm seriously considering doing Gundry's crinos and corvid forms as well at some point.

And I have other things queued up as well so plenty more drawing projects, so I better get a move on with those new bases.

This post also appears on my blog.

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Thanks for looking! ^_^