Sunday, January 06, 2008

Bouncing off clouds

Finished. This one was much less planned than most of my other pictures. Didn't even do a pencil sketch, just began straight away in Photoshop and made lots of mid-painting changes.
The initial idea, story-wise, also changed. I'm not entirely sure where it ended, though. I believe she's just waiting for Zeus to pick her up (she's not Europa, though), if he ever gets around to doing so and doesn't forget her (which he will). So she's just enjoying the stars and the moon while she can.

I finally managed to save over the original file while painting, thus losing a night's work (or two). That probably has to happen to everyone at least once. Let's hope that was my once (and only).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To prevent saving over files I create very much versions. There are advantages of doing so: You can compare different versions very easily and if a file is corrupt or saved over you have many other files with similar content you can go back to. And: you do not fear of doing some experiments. The disadvantage - the space it needs on your hard disk - is nowadays really no problem I think. Of course this procedure protects you only if you save the stuff often enough - in enough versions ;-)

Because I mostly do my illustrations by hand without using the computer I apply this rule just on my screen- and print-designs. And there are always a lot of versions! *G*

Maybe I should add that most drawings I do are sketches which are not very perfected.

Good night!
CwB

Manuela said...

I try to do that. But I got lazy in the last years, it seems. I used to have 12 or more different files for a painting, now I have six or less (sometimes only 2 or 3) and only save a new one at the end of the day/night if I remember to (for the rest, I just use different layers to see if I like the changes).
This will remind me to save more files more often again.

Although it's not fully negative - stuff gets better if you have to paint it more often, and the clouds did improve due to this (I'm just glad I didn't lose my motivation when I realized what I had done). So this was a biiiig learning experience ;)
1. Save a new file more than once per session
2. Don't make preview pictures at 3am; tiredness may win over carefulness.
3. It's better to make previews of the whole image, because if you do mess up, at least you have the whole picture that you can scale up and paint over, not just a small part.