NOTE: I wrote this on Monday and then totally forgot to post it.<\/p>\n
The Christmas break is the longest continuous period of vacation leave that I take in the year. During the summer, I parcel out my vacation days to have three or four day weekends throughout the months of July and August. This year, for Christmas I took a solid week and a half off. During that week off I went to bed no earlier than 1am<\/span><\/span> every night and woke up well after 10am m<\/span><\/span>ost days. It was nice. REALLY nice. Going back to work this morning was therefore a shock. That it was raining didn\u2019t help as I had to walk fifteen minutes on slippery sidewalks to buy my bus pass for the month which I had foolishly neglected to do when I went out on the weekend. Oh well, the routine has been reestablished now. It should be easier tomorrow<\/span><\/span> (HA!).<\/p>\n \n I spent the better part of Thursday<\/span><\/span> drawing a mash-up. Normally I draw mash-ups on the Friday<\/span><\/span> but the idea I had for this one was ambitious so I thought I\u2019d start early just in case I wouldn\u2019t get it done in one day. I started around noon<\/span><\/span> and by 8pm<\/span><\/span> I had finished inking it and took a break. I did a little colouring that evening, leaving the bulk of it for Friday<\/span><\/span>. I started around 10:30 on Friday<\/span><\/span> morning to find that the driver for my bamboo pad wasn\u2019t working properly and the other end of my pen (that normally works like an eraser) wouldn\u2019t work at all. I spent at least a half hour downloading an updated driver and installing it which required multiple reboots. I ended up fixing the problem although the sensitivity of the pen changed and I had to adjust accordingly. By 2:30<\/span><\/span> I had about a third left to shade. That\u2019s when disaster struck.<\/p>\n \n When I draw mash-ups I start by sketching out the rough shape of the character I\u2019m drawing large enough to fill the screen. Then I zoom out and sketch the rest of the body. That makes for a decent sized picture of one character. Well for this mash-up I was drawing two characters and then several other things around them so the picture was huge. To speed up the colouring, I tried using a larger brush. That combined with the size of the picture was apparently too taxing for my computer and the software stopped responding. I tried saving and closing the software and it crashed deleting the file leaving only a tmpsave in its place. MyPaint wouldn\u2019t recognize the tmpsave and no other software I had uses the .ora format so I had effectively lost all the work I\u2019d done on the picture. 10+ hours down the drain.<\/p>\n \n Sometimes the mistakes we make work in our favour however. Normally I save the open raster file in a particular folder and then the finished jpeg in a different folder. Well, in this case, when I had finished inking the picture I saved the raster in the wrong folder and instead of moving the file over to the correct folder, I saved a separate copy in the other folder, leaving the first copy in the incorrect folder. So while I had lost all the colouring work I\u2019d done on the file that was saved in the proper folder, I still had the black and white picture at least. I did try to recover the mostly coloured version because I didn\u2019t really want to start colouring from scratch. The attempts I made were unsuccessful however and I finally resigned myself to starting over. This time, I reduced the size of the picture so that it would be less taxing on my system. Even then, there was a point when I used a brush that was apparently too big and the software lagged, but I was able to finish the picture (and it\u2019s awesome!). I also discovered GIMP which is another application that recognizes .ora files (and the software I used to shrink the picture) which seems like a nifty program if a little more complicated to use than MyPaint.<\/p>\n \n If I hadn\u2019t had the backup raster file, I still would have had another out, because I had saved a jpeg of the black and white picture \u00a0to show a friend what I was working on (again, something I don\u2019t normally do). Colouring the jpeg would have been different than what I normally do and I\u2019m not sure I would have gone through that hassle, but again, I would at least have had SOMETHING to show for the hours of work I put into the piece.<\/p>\n \n Saturday<\/span><\/span> I took a break from drawing. I went to Zone 51 to pick up all the comics that were waiting for me and since I hadn\u2019t been able to go to the Zone since Halloween, there were a LOT. While in Trois Rivi\u00e8res, I was able to pick up some new Skylanders as well. So it was an expensive trip. Saturday<\/span><\/span> night I went to see Hunger Games: Catching Fire which I enjoyed.<\/p>\n \n Because I hadn\u2019t drawn anything on Saturday<\/span><\/span>, I had two strips to draw on Sunday<\/span><\/span>. The first featured 11 different characters (sometimes all in the same panel) and the second only featured 4, which went a lot smoother. I had problems with my keyboard which frustrated me to no end because I\u2019m constantly using Ctrl-Z to undo lines so it\u2019s critical that my keyboard works properly when I\u2019m drawing. I was already on edge because of all the problems I\u2019d had on Friday<\/span><\/span> and I got so mad that I smashed the keyboard against a box in my office. Not my proudest moment, but the funny thing is, it started working properly after that. I was really happy and relieved when I finished the second strip. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll be drawing anything before Friday<\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\n \n You\u2019ll get to see the results of this weekend\u2019s work in three weeks\u2019 time but I\u2019ve got some good stuff coming up this week too. Be sure to come back and see! I\u2019m back down to two strips a week, and with Flashbacks on Fridays, there won\u2019t be any Wednesday<\/span><\/span> updates for the time being.<\/p>\n \n Have a good week!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NOTE: I wrote this on Monday and then totally forgot to post it. The Christmas break is the longest continuous period of vacation leave that I take in the year. During the summer, I parcel out my vacation days to have three or four day weekends throughout the months of July and August. This year, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[39],"class_list":["post-3872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-carja-corner","tag-monday-blog","category-7-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ageofanimus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Carja.gif?fit=200%2C197&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1UaSI-10s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3873,"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3872\/revisions\/3873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ageofanimus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}