Weekly Update: #25


Hi, all! Welcome back for another weekly update!
No writing progress so far this week as I've mostly been working on one of my digital paintings.
On that front, I'm back to working on the creature painting and, by working, I mean staring endlessly at reference photos and then back at my painting to try and figure out how to paint what I'm needing to paint. I did, eventually, manage to put drawing pen to tablet and start painting, but not before I wasted hours by trying to redo something that didn't actually need to be redone, they just needed me to refine them more. If anyone tries to tell you that scales are easy to paint, laugh at them! They look a lot simpler than they actually are. I'm starting to lose count of the number of times I've restarted the scales on this creature because something of other didn't look right. The first time, they weren't uniform enough and they didn't contour properly to the creatures body. So, after taking a sanity break, I did some research on advice for painting scales so that I didn't make that same mistake again. They still didn't look quite right, but, now, after looking at a whole host of reference images of different scale types, I think I know better of what I need to do to fix that. First though, I need to get the scales all roughed in and then I'll be able to shade and detail better to give them dimension. I have the tendency to want to jump ahead too quickly to the rendering stage and want to skip all the rough paint stages. I'm working on that though and I am making progress. 
Speaking of progress, I did eventually end up getting some actual work done of the painting besides staring endlessly at references. In fact, I made more progress than what my current file shows, the reason being, my program shut down suddenly when it encountered a slight glitch and I'd not saved the newest changes yet. Yes, yes, I know. A silly mistake to make, but I was trying to finish roughing in this one section and planning to save afterwards. Only the glitch occurred before I got to that point and I had to start over. However, that at least means I've sorted out some of my problems so I know how to paint that area.
Once I get past all these scales, I'm fairly hopeful that the rest of the painting won't take as long to finish. I do still have another part of the creature that I'm redesigning, well, not so much redesigning as repositioning, so that might take a little bit to problem solve. However, once it's been repositioned, the actual rendering should be a lot more straightforward than with scales. 
New work-in-progress screenshots coming soon for patrons!
I did try to work on my writing on Wednesday, but, unfortunately, it was one of those days where the mind just refused to cooperate with my plans. Sometimes, you just can't push through brain fog. 
Well, that's all for this week! Thanks for reading!