#anyways more wof stuff soon hopefully

[dragonz-r-kewl]

i love my oc

this took four hours and crashed my laptop twice

[teethstoobigmouthwontclose]

What a year! I've been quite pleased with my art this year, though I wouldn't say I've made much improvement ^-^'' No worries, I only draw for fun :) Talking about my art + links to each piece under the readmore

JAN The Blackiron This is my DnD character from an irl friend's campaign. He's a Dragonborn Fighter. I really like how the green flames turned out, I've never much bothered with lighting before. FEB Blackscourge the Ascended A joke that my DM friend wasn't meant to see... he found it anyway lmao. Blackiron didn't become a dragon, but he did become a god! This campaign was amazing. MAR Thoughtstealer This was originally an adopt I withdrew because I liked it so much 😅 Thoughtstealer is a WoF Nightwing artificially created in an attempt to produce an Animus. You can read more about it on it's Toyhouse page. APR Daggers Daggers is an OC created for me by my friend 3zr. You can read more about her on her Toyhouse page. MAY Jealousy I've never had an OC's story develop so quickly from conception to conclusion, but I was inspired 😊 In this piece, my OCs Daggers and Sage are fighting. Daggers has been trying to court another dragon - Mars - not knowing that Mars is Sage's mate. Note the scratch from Sage's venomous tail-spikes... yeah, she's already dead. JUN Chainbreaker An OC created for me by my friend DishyWishy. I'm glad I got around to drawing some proper art for him - though I had hoped he'd get some more art from ArtFight! Maybe next year. Chainbreaker's story is somewhat inspired by this song. You can read more about him on his Toyhouse page. JULVulpes Stellarum My favourite ArtFight piece, and it's not even a dragon 🤯 I really went in for nebula patterns this year... For ArtFight 2025 I think I'll focus on only drawing dragons, and only drawing headshots. Every year I injure my wrist... AUGWrasse Feels a bit shameful to have a basefill on my 2024 summary... but I didn't do much art - the new WoW expac came out!! This was made using AriilsArting's WoF Chibi Bases

SEPLovie An OTA which (at the time of posting this summary) is still open! Make an offer on the deviation's page or on TH. OCTRed Lightning Boi 2024 A redraw of this piece from 2020. I do still feel that a lot of my older art has a lot of charm that my new stuff has lost, but I feel my new art is better. NOVPig A gift for a friend as part of the Friendsgiving event hosted on The Poison Jackal's Discord server. I've never drawn anything porcine before! Really pleased with how this turned out 😌 DECAurelia An OC with a story I'm really fond of :) You can read it starting on her sister Argent's TH page, then on Aurelia's TH page. There'll be a third and final OC/part coming soon... hopefully in 2025 >:)

[beardmanandjen]

Good Times Bad Times

It’s been a funny old week. Here’s a (long) summary:

It’s summer here in Kaikoura and we’ve been blessed with some beautiful warm sunny days...every Friday to Monday. My days off are Tuesday - Thursday and for some reason for the past few weeks the summer weather hasn’t quite managed to make it all the way to Tuesday. Maybe it had a series of heavy weekends and needed three days off to recover. Whatever the reason it’s been making me a bit crazy...especially when I go back to work on a Friday and spend the day looking out at the gorgeous calm seas perfect for paddle-boarding on and perfect blue skies.

So I was VERY excited on Monday when I looked at the weather forecast for the next few days and it said SUNSHINE and NO WIND!!!! I couldn’t wait to get back out on the ocean for a paddle board and hopefully go out on a boat tour.

Monday night was Galentine’s Day celebrations with the girls from work which were awesome and hilarious involving singing loudly to the Shania Twain and Abba songs that another girl inexplicably kept choosing on the Jukebox full of thousands of tunes. It was a great start to what was set to be an awesome weekend.

HOWEVER. 

Tuesday morning I woke up to discover I couldn’t open my left eye. When I eventually prized it open it was the size of a pea and bright red. During the morning I tried to bathe it and keep it moist (great word) but all that seemed to achieve was spreading it to my other eye so by the time Nick got home from work both eyes were seeping yellow pus and becoming redder and redder. Nick also brought home the news that on their morning tour a juvenile humpback whale had rocked up and swam around their boat. 

I was hoping they’d sort themselves out overnight but I woke up on Wednesday morning to both eyes sealed shut with gross goop and when I got them open they were BRIGHT red and painful. I was now looking like Lord Voldemort and Sloth from the Goonies had made a love child. As I was lying in bed with a flannel on my face feeling sorry for myself, Nick got a call from work that there was a pod of Orca swimming north and did we want to go out on the boat. I couldn’t see out of my Voldemort eyes by this point and they were so swollen it was making my face hurt so I obviously couldn’t go. So Nick and Phil quickly made their way to work, and I continued to lay in my pitch black room crying with jealousy and despair over missing the Orca. I was also seething with irrational rage and decided I hated everyone who had seen whales in the past couple of days and making a mental note to wipe my mouldy Voldy eyes all over them the next time I saw them.

Top - Bottom: Monday night normal eyes, Tuesday morning gammy left eye, Wednesday morning two gammy eyes.

I eventually went to the doctors on Thursday morning and was diagnosed with viral conjunctivitis. The Dr was pretty alarmed that I’d been out of the house and seen other people the night before (when I’d decided I felt better and gone to a BBQ) and she kept using hand sanitizer throughout my whole appointment...she sent me straight home, signed me off from work for a few days and told me not to leave the house. I like excuses not to leave the house (unless it’s sunny and the sea is full of Orca of course) so this wasn’t the worst news in the world. 

Today they are definitely better than yesterday, I just look like I’ve been crying for about a year which is better than looking like the Demon Headmaster. I’m even feeling a bit bad about how bitter and angry I was about Nick’s Orca experience so I might even let him do a blog post about them...maybe. 

We’ve also had some sad news about our beloved Luke the Campervan. We’ve noticed he’s been a bit rusty in places over the last few weeks, and living right next to the sea definitely doesn’t help. Nick took him for a WOF (same as a MOT) the other day and he failed due to the rust. He got our friend Kim to look over him and he said it’s not looking great...so he took him to see a car person who basically said if we want him fixed properly it’s going to cost at least $2000. He said the best thing we can do is to do a ‘quick fix’ then sell him as soon as possible. We’re really gutted about this as our plan was to go on one last road trip back up the country in Luke after finishing at Dolphin Encounter then eventually sell him in Auckland. It’s now looking like this won’t be possible and we’ll need to sell him as soon as we can :( To be honest we didn’t need to keep him after we started working but we always thought we’d be able to travel a bit more in him.

Having never owned a car before and after living in Luke for half a year I do feel very attached to the poor beast and I’ll be really sad to sell him. But he’s been pretty good to us and hopefully the next owners won’t keep him as long and he’ll be good to them too <3

So this brings me on the announcement. I feel like I’m being an annoying reality TV program that teased the most exciting part on the trailers and waited until the end to get to it. SOZ GUYS.

We’ve lived in Kaikoura for almost five months now and a lot of that time was disrupted quite rudely by the earthquake and it’s aftermath. We love living here, enjoy our jobs and the New Zealand way of life really suits us. We’re only allowed to work for 12 months of our 23 month working holiday visa which would mean we’d not be able to work any more after June, even though our visas run out in October. Aaaand we’re not quite done with New Zealand yet.

To cut a long story short we’ve found another visa that will enable us to stay an extra year. HOWEVER. To apply for this visa we have to go back to the UK and send it off from there. We have to stay in the UK for at least two months while the visa stuff gets sorted out before we can return to NZ. 

Soooo...WE’RE COMING HOME FOR THE SUMMER!!!! 

Yep...we’ll be back at the end of May (after a couple of days exploring Singapore) and get to spend the summer with you guys before heading back up here as NZ summer begins! (it’s been my dream since I can remember to skip winter and it’s finally coming true!) 

We’re so excited to join in with the summer shenanigans i.e. HARLEQUIN!!! and see our beautiful friends and families ESPECIALLY Reuben, Jack, Freddy and Louis who are growing up too fast and need to see our faces more and commit them to memory immediately. We’re super excited about Harlequin as we experienced hard core FOMO last year, although it’ll be hard to go back to camping in a tent after living the high life in Luke (first world problems).

Anyway, we’ll be calling on all sorts of favours from you lovely people as we’ll be poor, jobless, homeless and carless for the few months we’re back. If you’re happy to feed us and let us stay with you, we’ll dazzle you with our personalities and help with the washing up. Deal?

Now that the flights are booked we’re going to relax and enjoy our last few months in Kaikoura with the gorgeous friends we’ve made here, hopefully see some more Orca (they BETTER come back) whilst trying to sort Luke out and working out how we can bribe our landlords to let us stay in this house again next year.

We’ll keep you updated. Thanks for making it to the end!