It was nice while it lasted. I can’t wait for July when ALL my weekends will be four day weekends!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
![\"Arrow-Orig-vs-Reink\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ageofanimus.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Arrow-Orig-vs-Reink.gif?ssl=1\"){kind=icon}
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