Once again, I thank Warren Ellis for his generosity in allowing me to blog sketches from an undeveloped work. Can’t really tell you much about it, but I thought you might enjoy a look.
I know I have a few more sketches from this around here somewhere, but darned if I can find them. Curse my lousy art filing system.
I am so involved with new projects, I can’t take much time to attend to the originals. Also, I am dedicating most of my free time to scanning and archiving my photo files.
Last Thursday was the first time I had a real opportunity to go into the city since February 8. Unfortunately, it was all work and no Watchmen movie for me! I haven’t seen Coraline, either. Too sick to go out for about six weeks.
The cord to my digital camera had gone home to Jesus. I could not wait any longer for the photos I had taken for reference on my last trip to New York, so off I went to get a card reader, a 1 TB external hard drive (which I will use to archive all my art and put in the safe deposit box), and some decent speakers for the computer. I’ve had lousy luck with film processing lately, and now won’t have to worry about it anymore. I’ll just take reference photos and use them right away instead of having to take a 3 hour round trip to the city.
I’m already packaging up old photos to store away forever. I will not miss having to flip through these things by hand.
On the new book, I have over 600 reference images alone, so keeping track of it all digitally is a great help. While I don’t use many photos for the figure work, I have to have accurate location reference for this new book. And since most of my photos from the last five years are also on disc, I am uploading them and archiving them.
I hope I will be able to ditch a lot of the material in my old swipe files. Yes, every artist has them. This is how we are able to draw things like the Taj Mahal even when we have never visited to take our own snaps.
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The card readers from ScanDisk are wonderful and a real time saver for when I had to get my vacation photos off the disc without trying to find the box I stored the cables in.
Colleen, what’s the average size of the files for your original art? 1TB is a lot of space, but does that only work for an issue’s worth of art? I imagine colored art uses more memory space.
Hi Jeremy,
I love my new card reader. I had one of those photo/scanners/printers years ago that not only didn’t work very well, it did a quick death and I never replaced it.
This new card reader not only cost next to nothing, it is super fast and works great.
The average A Distant Soil comic page file runs about 7 MB at 1200 dpi. The average color file is about 600 MB at 600 dpi.
The Tori Amos file, for example, uses 14 GB, but those files are stored as both layers and flattened files, and as jpegs, so there’s about 3 versions of each page in there, as well as sketches and prelims.
It will be a long time before I fill up a TB of space. I intend to store all my art on external hard drives from now on and ditch my cd archive system entirely. The cd’s are unreliable and are not guaranteed to last.
I will have all my art backed up on 4 hard drives in three locations, and if that won’t protect the art, nothing will. External hard drives are very affordable and much easier to deal with than cd storage. I’m really happy with the firewire EHD I just got. Super fast and easy!
I should be able to archive the entirety of the 1000 pages A Distant Soil on one hard drive, and still have plenty of space left over. Including cover art.
Having personally lost files that was on external hard drives (fortunately as backup so I still had the original files) I got a little worried when I read that you intend to store all your art on external HDDs. However, when I saw you will be using 4 of them in different locations i didn’t worry quite as much.
A lot of my colleagues has also had external HDDs die on them, so since a while back we only have data on the external HDDs that we also have other places or we don’t care if it disappears.
Hi Brian,
Yeah, I’ve heard of external HD giving up the ghost, too. I’ve also had some discs simply not work even after being verified.
So, I have a computer with two hard drives installed, one which backs up the other with Time Machine.
I have two external hard drives attached and transfer important image files to them.
So, in the end, I will have multiple external hard drives to back up my multiple external hard drives. At least until someone figures out a better way to store data.
I tried to use MOZY, but my daily usage quota with my current internet service makes it pretty useless.
BTW, I just want to say again how appreciative of the advice I get from you guys out there. I have learned a lot about computers and graphics from you all and I truly appreciate you being so generous with your time.
Someday I should tell the story of the image cataloguing project I had to undertake at my last job, which involved a couple hundred thousand images in slide form, about 10,000 files, and 5 1TB drives in a RAID array on an OSX server, and 3 interns.
Never, ever again. I mention it, because that’s where I learned about external hard drives’ tendency to not mount, but yet still have all their data, which Brian touched on. I’ll just say this: get really comfy with the OSX Terminal, get your liver in training for the almost-inevitable drinking that will happen, and this priceless command: sudo /sbin/fsck -fy
So, if it’s dangerous to store on external hard drives and dangerous to store on discs, does anyone want to share safe storage plans? I’m thinking my redundancy plan is pretty safe.
There are now online services offering data storage, saying they are highly secure. But me, I just don’t like the idea of my data, be it records or manuscripts or art scans being on a remote server the physical location of which I do not know, trusting entirely in their security measures.
I think you are doing just about the best options, Colleen. And reminding me that I really need to do a better job at backing up my own stuff.
Solid-state drives and the larger USB flash drives can provide secure storage as well. Plus saves on space. I’ve seen 32GB flash drives which do provide plenty of storage. Granted, the cost would add up getting a number of them in comparison to one big external hard drive. But I think the larger the drive, there becomes an issue of stability within the drive that gives cause for concern.
It’s not necessarily dangerous — you’ve got redundancy built into your backup plan, which is wise. It’s more that irony is the true operating principle of the universe, and so if you keep only The One True Copy of a file, irony will notice, and then wherever that file lives will be struck by angry demons from the plane of Baa’tor.
As I, uh, learned much to my infinite regret.
I think I’m going to wait on a solid state drive option, mostly because of the cost, but by the time I get around to it, there will be something ten times better that will outlast the pyramids.
BTW, just had a flash drive go home to Jesus on me last week. But yeah, I think they’d be a good back up option over discs any day. I could probably store as many as 20 comics on one of them.
Discs are too easy to scratch up and misfile.