Comic for Monday, May 2, 2011

Commentary

Posted May 2, 2011 at 1:00 am
These are sketches for what should have been the first panel of Monday's comic, but will instead be Tuesday's. This is being posted first as a story comic to alert people to this, but will be moved to the sketchbook later.

As much as I would recommend Photoshop or similar programs to most cartoonists, I've taken to the madness that is Illustrator. Unfortunately, the Illustrator file became corrupt before I had made a separate, flat high res version of it (and subsequently the website version), and it happened in such a way that I didn't know it was corrupt until it was too late.

The reason I wouldn't know until it was too late was because this is the sort of glitch that happens when saving the file. The file saves and everything seems fine... until you try to open or import it, and then you discover that only some of the layers still exist. I had the Illustrator file open all through the post-sketching process, so I never knew there was a problem until it was way too late to do anything about it. Whatever caused the glitch happened too early for any backups to matter, either.

The good news is that the sketches survived, and I can remake the comic. The bad news is that will take a while and I discovered this problem too late for Monday. So I'm pushing things back a day. I know it sucks, but that's where I'm at right now.

The reason Dex brings up the Scissors tool is because this used to be a problem I lived in fear of with an earlier version of Illustrator (CS2). Through trial and error, I figured out the glitch was associated with using Illustrator's scissors tool on a brush stroke line. I've experimented with it in later versions and didn't encounter the corrupt save glitch again, so I started using it again where applicable. I have no idea what actually caused the problem this time. but I DID use the scissors tool at one point, and I have my suspicions.

All I know for sure is that I am going to be saving copies and testing them all throughout the remaking of this comic, and probably with all future comics for a while, too.

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