It was nice while it lasted. I can’t wait for July when ALL my weekends will be four day weekends!

I did some drawing on Saturday, as I am normally inclined to do. It was a new flashback of Todrick as Green Arrow and overall I was pleased with how it turned out. I finished colouring it and only had the shading left to do when I decided I needed to get ready for my upcoming evening of gaming with friends. I saved and went on with the preparations. Later that evening I returned to my computer to read up in the boardgamegeek forums on the game we’d just played (DC Comics Deck-Building Game for the curious). I like to do this while the game is still fresh in my mind so that I can read up on rules questions that came up while we were playing and see what I got wrong (usually quite a bit). An hour or so later, I closed all the windows I had open and went to bed.

On Sunday morning, I opened up MyPaint intent on finishing the mashup. Wait a second…why is there a jpg file there? Where’s my ora file with all the layers? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! I believe I mentioned back when I was talking about the trouble I had drawing the Bill and Ted flashback that MyPaint uses a proprietary format known as an .ora (for open raster I believe). It keeps all the layers separate so I can tinker around with them whenever I want (much as one can do in Photoshop). A while back, I changed the settings in MyPaint to make jpegs the default saving format which means that I have to manually switch to ora when I create the file. All nice and good but this time, I wasn’t paying attention and I worked in jpeg the whole time which was fine while MyPaint was open, but when I closed it, all I was left with was the jpeg which merges all the layers together.

I’m really obsessive about my layers because it just makes things so much easier when it comes to cleaning things up (and I do so need to clean things up as I draw). I only had the shading left to do but I wasn’t confident I’d be able to do a good job shading directly over the one layer. Usually I do my colouring and shading in layers under the ink so that the linework is always remains clean on top, untouched by my sloppy colouring and shading techniques.

So what could I do? Well, I am far from adept when it comes to Photoshop so there are probably plenty of ways I could have used to fix things. The best I could think of though was to use the select tool to select the black lines to create a mask which I could then use as a new foundation layer and then create new layers underneath to colour in like I usually do. A nice idea in theory, but the selection wasn’t perfect and the surviving lines weren’t as clean as I’d like them and some lines didn’t survive at all. I would have needed to apply a LOT of touch-ups for it to be usable. I started to do so but found the work really tedious. I decided then that I’d rather re-ink using the original drawing as my “sketch”. So I did. Here’s a comparative selection to show how it went (you’ll need to enlarge the picture by clicking on it to really see what I’m talking about).

Having to redraw the whole thing set me back though. I didn’t draw a second strip this weekend. I’ll need to do so during the week to keep from falling behind (I’ve got a headache today so not in the best headspace to draw). You’ll be able to see whether the extra work was worth it in three weeks when the flashbacks goes live on the site. For now though, have a good week everybody!