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Shrinking Massive Clip Studio Paint Pages into One Layer
In my project to move my Clip Studio Paint files to iCloud so that I can import them into CSP on my iPad, I ran into a big problem. When I tried to upload a file from my desktop computer, I received an error message that said I could not save the rile to a remote device (iCloud) because the file was being used by another service. iCloud was updating the file after a CSP autosave. I would have to wait until iCloud had transferred the autosave version.
On the iPad, I ran into a problem when I tried to download a file: CSP locked up while the file was downloading, sometimes for many minutes. Uploading files from the iPad caused the same lockup.
When I examined the file sizes for my CSP files, the cause of the delays was obvious: the files were enormous. By “enormous”, I mean 458MB. The smaller files ranged from 180MB to 300MB. It would be unreasonable to expect that these files would move quickly from my desktop CSP to iCould to my iPad. It was painful.
To make the process snappier I simply flattened the files. The 458MB file became a 65K file. In fact, all of the flattened files ended up being about 65k. They uploaded quickly, opened quickly, saved quickly, and were available on my iPad in seconds.
The problem with flattening files is that I no longer have the layers necessary for making major changes to the images. To preserve that information, my strategy is to save that information before flattening the files. I copied the entire project to a drive on my computer. If I need to redo the inking or color, I have a the complete page, with all of its layers, available.
Keeping two versions of the file is extra complexity, but it’s workable.
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Pages 3 and 4, Revised
Not much to say about this. It’s a redo and clean up as I move into the final stretch, racing toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
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Page 3 Revised
It was a big day in Southern Oregon. I had my yearly checkup and I was pronounced healthy. Also, the plumbers replaced the pipesfrom our house to the city’s main line. The house was built in the 50’s, when Orangeburg pipe was commonly used. It has a life span of about 50 years — ours lasted 70. The replacement pipe is PVC, which will last up to 150 years. Long enough, I say.
To complete page 3, I enhanced the colors, added a walrus, and painted the circus tents in the distance.
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Under the weather
I’m not feeling great today. I haven’t eaten for the last 24 hours. The idea of eating is unthinkable. The cause…I’ve tracked it down to a bad bottle of very expired buffalo sauce.
Despite feeling like shit, I was able to finish page 15, which has been languishing in an incomplete state for over a year. In this picture we see that Jimmy and Betty have been rescued by a mysterious character, a dolphin.
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Too Many Backup Locations!
When I get paranoid about losing all of my work, I make a backup. My computer has a total of 6 hard drives, not counting iCloud, pCloud, and OneDrive. I have three complete backups for my third Jimmy Jay book. Each one is a snapshot of the book at a particular date. That’s all good…until I start revising my pages in the wrong location.
Today I realized that I had created a new page in one of the backups. Then it occurred to me that I may have created other pages in one of the other backups. I went a little insane and started examining all of the images in all of the backups.
After a couple of hours I found 2 pages that were not in the Real Working Directory. The silver lining to my panic is that I examined the size of every file, looking for signs that a file had been changed.Some of the files are more than 400GB in size. That’s because I use a shit ton of layers. I have to get rid of the unused layers. When a page is finished, there should be one layer for line work, one layer for colors, a layer for texture, one for shadows, and one for the background,
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Morning in Lithia Park
Sundays I’ve been going out mornings to take photos. My first excursions were to Lithia Park, which was designed by John McClaren, the man who designed San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
This fountain is the Butler-Perozzi Fountain, hauled all the way to the Pacific Northwest in 1915 from the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. It’s striking to think that an fountain carved in Italy would end up in what was then an unknown logging town.
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Pages 74 and 75, finished
My deadline for finishing the drawings for book 3 is July 31. After that I’ll have three weeks to prepare the text and images for publication. I’ll use InDesign for laying out the pages and creating the PDF for Ingramspark. InDesign is a tough slog. I’ve forgotten everything I know about it. I last worked with it in February of 2021 when I completed my the second book in the fabulous “Adventures of Jimmy Jay” series.
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Bigger Eyes are Cuter Eyes
Thanks to the Clip Studio Paint liquefy tool, I was able to enlarge Kitty’s eyes in just a few seconds.
In the right page, I added in the birds perched on Mr. Moai and on Dylan’s snout. Adding the birds was necessary for continuity. They first appear in page 25, then reappear in page 59. I’ll add the birds to page 61, also, showing them fluttering around Mr. Moai’s head as Kitty revives him from his 300-year sleep.
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Reviving an old sketch of the Easter Island Volcano Demon
I’m going to find a place in the story for this image. The reader needs to know that the volcano demon’s rage is implacable and heartless. Overly dramatic? Oh, how can a fictitious volcano demon be overly dramatic? This beast has turned an entire island’s population, save for one boy, into stone statues.
The story needs a villain and the villain’s redemption, and that’s what it will get.
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I'm moving my Clip Studio Paint files to iCloud
I’d like to say that Clip Studio Cloud is really great, but it’s not. The upload speed, for me, is 0.05MP/sec, which means that large files, such as my 250MB pages with 70 layers, will never sync in my lifetime.
I wanted to use the CSP cloud so I could use Clip Studio Paint Ex on my iPad up to work on my book files. It seemed like the obvious thing to do, but what’s the point of having 100GB of storage when you don’t get the bandwidth necessary to move large image files.
My solution was to give up on the Clip Studio Cloud and put my 22GB of book files into the my iCloud account. Within an hour all of my files were shareable on my iPad. Problem solved.
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Dreading Page 28 -- The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
Every time I see page 28 I cringe and move on to another page, any page. Now that I’m almost finished repainting the many damaged pages I created a year ago, page 28 has floated like a corpse to the top of the stack. My job is to make this character, Betty Burro, cute. She also has to look like all of the other Betty Burro paintings in the book. Yikes!
We’re having weather straight from Hell. It’s 104 outside and close to 90 in the studio. The humans are sweating and the canines are panting. Our downstairs space, however, is a comfortable 72. So that I can work without sweating — and the dogs can be comfortable — I've decided to work down there. To do that, I need to move my work station downstairs…or, I need to install Clip Studio Paint on my iPad. I’ve tried it before and didn’t really take to it. I’m hoping that it works out better this time. Maybe I can overcome the bitter taste of my previous encounter. Maybe...
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Page 56 Redone and My Lens Arrived from Ukraine
That’s supposed to be a wet kitten.
I bought a lens for my Leica on EBay. The seller is in Ukraine. I’m amazed that the lens could be delivered even though Ukraine is being horrifically attacked.
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Redrawing Page 56
This page is under construction. The original of this page, which I’ve deleted, wasn’t cute and if had thick, fuzzy inking. I re-inked everything (a dozen times) and made the kitten, and Betty, cuter.
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Page 60 Redrawn -- Jimmy Jay and Dylan Dolphin waking up
For page 60 I used a simple G-pen to replace the fuzzy pencil ink. I like the pencil-look, but I believe that I’m more likely to maintain a consistent style by sticking with simple ink lines.
My strategy is now to replace my “painterly” pages with simple line drawings. As for coloring, I’m using the bucket tool to lay down the base color, then using multiply and lighten layers to apply the shadows and highlights.
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Redrawing Page One
When I started the book, I imagined Jimmy Jay and Betty Burro running from the Monarch Butterfly sanctuary to Guadalajara. I got frustrated with the background and decided to just sketch the two of them running and move on. I would come back to finish the page later. It is now later.
My plan is to re-ink both characters, re-color them, and then add a jungle background.
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Redrawing Page 31
I’ve been distracted lately. When that happens, the best I can do is to go through the book and start repairing pictures that need work. When I review the pages, I see that they look unfinished, as if I was in a hurry — or lazy — when I decided that the page was good enough.
Page 31 needs re-inking and coloring — a complete makeover.
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Redrawing page 60
Jimmy Jay is unrecognizable on page 60. That’s him on top. He’s cute in an ugly way, but it takes a stretch of the imagination to accept him as the real Jimmy Jay. I don’t want the reader to start wondering who this new character is. The corrected Jimmy is the below.
When I drew this page, I was going through “rough inking madness” and now I have to redo the linework, at least for Jimmy and Dylan. The background can remain rough. I have several more pages that use heavy outlines.
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