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11 years ago
I have two major multi-image projects I want to get done soon... one a full-color digital comic, the other a cohering of several sketches. My daily schedule is ridiculously ragged - since the animation building closes at 10 PM, my late sleep and busy day keep me from lightboxes. My work is thus restricted to what I can do between ten and three AM, which is my target for falling asleep on non-early-shift days.
In the absence of being able to animate anything with goddamn paper, I've been trying to improve my digital art at night.
I'm not a traditional purist, in fact I really hate those guys, but I mostly got into animation for that aphrodisiacal feeling of paper under my hand. Only the wondrous maw of digital color can alleviate this for me - I adore being able to fish out any color I should need. So I spend a fuckton of time on that until I have it perfect.
Either way, after working from about seven to two on some of these pictures, iTunes freezes my entire computer. I have to reboot it.
Now I find that the files I saved are no longer in my folder - and the screen captures I took as backup did not save to desktop, fuck knows why. Gone.
The entire night's work is gone, just when I'm getting productive.
These were not easy things to lose, mind you. One had hundreds of local and tonal color swatches (which I thought I had saved but apparently not), out of which I had to adjust the palettes of four characters in three lighting schemes. And I don't just slap on a transparency and call it done, I adjust the hue and leaning of each color to preserve and interest the saturation (so that, for example, under a slightly magenta light her green eyes don't turn completely gray). I'm an absolute whore for color theory.So that's fucking off.
Another was a complete color script for a sixteen-page comic with lots of subtle harmonies and two diurnal shifts, including a broad sweep (that I was pretty proud of) that comprised highway scenes, interiors of a backwoods office, a '70s motel room, and a nighttime winter national park. And everything harmonized with everything else. I was so fucking proud of that.
Still another was a fully inked comic page.
Currently, the only thing from this session that actually saved was a doodle I did to test one of the color schemes.
The worst part? I spent an hour simply drawing, for the comics page, a close-up of a road sign in chunky sans serif modern font, that I decided to draw by hand for texture. So, basically, Helvetica by hand. I spent an hour reworking and erasing white letters until I had them perfectly kerned, perfectly smooth, made of right angles and perfect curves. IF YOU HAVEN'T TRIED TO ADJUST TEXT BY HAND, YOU DON'T KNOW THIS TYPOGRAPHER'S PAIN.
WAY too fucking discouraging. And I can't even play loud music to alleviate my grief, the walls are paper thin. I hate my internal clock. YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND BABY RIGHT ROUND LIKE A RECORD BABY ROUND ROUND RIGHT FUCKING ROUND.
In the absence of being able to animate anything with goddamn paper, I've been trying to improve my digital art at night.
I'm not a traditional purist, in fact I really hate those guys, but I mostly got into animation for that aphrodisiacal feeling of paper under my hand. Only the wondrous maw of digital color can alleviate this for me - I adore being able to fish out any color I should need. So I spend a fuckton of time on that until I have it perfect.
Either way, after working from about seven to two on some of these pictures, iTunes freezes my entire computer. I have to reboot it.
Now I find that the files I saved are no longer in my folder - and the screen captures I took as backup did not save to desktop, fuck knows why. Gone.
The entire night's work is gone, just when I'm getting productive.
These were not easy things to lose, mind you. One had hundreds of local and tonal color swatches (which I thought I had saved but apparently not), out of which I had to adjust the palettes of four characters in three lighting schemes. And I don't just slap on a transparency and call it done, I adjust the hue and leaning of each color to preserve and interest the saturation (so that, for example, under a slightly magenta light her green eyes don't turn completely gray). I'm an absolute whore for color theory.So that's fucking off.
Another was a complete color script for a sixteen-page comic with lots of subtle harmonies and two diurnal shifts, including a broad sweep (that I was pretty proud of) that comprised highway scenes, interiors of a backwoods office, a '70s motel room, and a nighttime winter national park. And everything harmonized with everything else. I was so fucking proud of that.
Still another was a fully inked comic page.
Currently, the only thing from this session that actually saved was a doodle I did to test one of the color schemes.
The worst part? I spent an hour simply drawing, for the comics page, a close-up of a road sign in chunky sans serif modern font, that I decided to draw by hand for texture. So, basically, Helvetica by hand. I spent an hour reworking and erasing white letters until I had them perfectly kerned, perfectly smooth, made of right angles and perfect curves. IF YOU HAVEN'T TRIED TO ADJUST TEXT BY HAND, YOU DON'T KNOW THIS TYPOGRAPHER'S PAIN.
WAY too fucking discouraging. And I can't even play loud music to alleviate my grief, the walls are paper thin. I hate my internal clock. YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND BABY RIGHT ROUND LIKE A RECORD BABY ROUND ROUND RIGHT FUCKING ROUND.
The equivalent for me would be if I poured a drink over my current drawing, then being so angry that I knock over the chandelier in my room, thus setting fire on all the rest of my art...which is still saved on several USB sticks, so I guess I'm fine Although I wonder if we can remain friends, since you apparently hate us traditional purists But I luckily might not count as a purist, since I polish all my artwork with SAI and a tablet afterwards. Anyway, be assured of my condolences for your data loss
And yeah, I play high stakes just due to the sheer volume of images I create and save (my reference morgue, the one I reconstructed after I lost that drive, is already in the five-digit range).
Perhaps, perhaps...
And this is the first time it's frozen in several months, after me using it for like twelve hours a day for recreation, classwork, socializing and art. Apple is fucking amazing at making things so secure and simple, even to the point of uselessness, that even I of all people could use it in comfort and safety. It is problematic that you have no way to fix things if they break and remotely lock down, but it happens way, way, WAY less than with other computers.
I can see both sides, which is why I hold no truck with purists. They're just trying to justify to themselves why their thousands-of-dollars decision was the right one.
The same with traditional purists. Good god, man, I'm not talking about furry art here - you're totally fine - I'm talking about ANIMATION. Those classmates I have who blindly dismiss anything CGI-related as "cheating" or "aesthetically crass." These fuckos obviously have never actually done computer animation. They're convinced that there's some sort of war between hand-drawn and computer animation, and their side must win. I hate being dragged into it. I just prefer drawing things to manipulating things - I enjoy both. One of them just became mainstream because the films that used it were much less shitty than the other.
We have a severe problem in this subculture with blind veneration. There are so many people who blindly adore Chuck Jones or Walt Disney or Don Bluth or Ralph Bakshi or John Kricfalusi or ANYONE with an uncritical eye and a sort of worship. Don Bluth is particular is like a really awful cult, with legions on their forums praising the guy who made "A Troll In Central Park" as the absolute savior of the medium, a god incarnate. And John Kricfalusi has so many people who parrot his polemics - I have so many classmates who criticize your work almost exactly verbatim for how he criticizes things. No original opinions at all.
It's like watching atheist groups talk about Richard Dawkins. The human brain needs something to worship, and it turns us pretty damn stupid a lot of the time.
*hugs*
I know them quite well (I can fix a lot of problems to get back what is apparently lost), and I have taken habits to avoid some loss. Make regular files saves, in my software format, and in PNG in case of. And try to keep alternative supports quite up to date to avoid critical loss, in case of again.
And even with that if I lost something, try to stay positive, and says in my head that was not to share, not to keep, just to train and experience. But it still hard situation.
Yeah, those are all things I do regularly. Perhaps some of the data got wiped.
It's a very hard situation! Even if it's just practice, it's nice to have around.
And I know the pain of losing material to computer fuck-ups. I once lost nearly 2 years worth of writing and compositions to a hard drive failure. It was, I'd imagine, like being pushed under the wheels of a golf buggy — or having a car tire fall from the rafters onto my belly.
(hugs) Those suck... incredibly suck.
Regarding the computer disaster — I would've been REALLY sunk if I hadn't printed off most of my compositions a few months earlier!