Recovery time (Patreon)

What a month...   one contract left me with just enough time to draw & ink the one comic page, but there's been no time to color it.  Another contract was supposed to start just as the other was completed, with the idea being that we would complete this second one before the 15th.  Unfortunately for me and my team, the client's lead artist was out sick all week and couldn't get us what we needed, so work ended up intruding on our vacation time.

I had to take my laptop up north with me, just so I could skin this model.  I finished a rough pass and turned it in for review, then spent the next day hanging out with my best friend.  Or intended to, anyway.  A company Skype call forced me to cut the visit short.  Again, work intruding on vacation time.  Based on client feedback, I needed to make some changes to the skin weights.  I then spend most of the next day struggling with the area they'd highlighted, only to conclude that it just wasn't going to work - there's too much detail and too many bones in that area, and skin is limited to 4 influences per point (currently some are weighted to 7 or more).  After explaining the situation to my boss, he agreed that we should up the limit to 5, and hope that works.  And also because this ended up being such a nightmare, he told me to step away from it, enjoy the weekend, and get back to it once I'm back in Florida.  That was Thursday.

Today, after 20 or so hours on the road, I'm back in Florida.  Hopefully the increased bone limit makes the skin easier to clean up.  I'm tired and don't want to devote too much more time to it.  I still don't know when I'll be able to color the comic page, or do an inked version of the Christmas pinup.

Anyway, the point of this post beyond giving a status update - with so little finished, should I disable billing?  You all may know by now how guilty I feel about having an off-month.  Alternatively, I could disable billing next month and use it as catch-up time, depending on how the next contract pans out.