Ok, yes, this is me fixing to rant. Like, epic rant.

I've been labeled a standard of measure, an epic writer, a legend... though that last was from some prepubescent squeak of a person who never posted comments on my stuff ever again after. So I don't know how honest he/she was being.

But I feel epic enough tonight to give an EPIC RANT.

Ok... I am steaming. Imagine a twentysomething woman with big eyes and long flame-red gold hair, all business and teeth bared, with hot vapor shooting out of her ears and all the veins in her big eyes showing.

That'd be about how I look right now.

Roar!

Okay, so this is why.

I was recently asked by my best friend in the whole world to do a picture (specifically a drawing) of her "in the future", after she had "achieved her dreams". Not too hard... I have a billion pictures of the woman, since she is fond of professional photoshooting, so references were in plenty. I even had an idea that I thought I could pull off, with my meager drawing skills.

I own neither tablet nor decent photoediting program. I do everything with a pencil, a pen, a clipboard of copy paper, and my mother's printer/scanner bed. And... GIMP, which I am told is totally junk but I think is tons better than the 1993 version of Paint. Not PaintShop, and not PaintShopPro... just Paint. The darn thing is so old, the program cannot handle high-res pictures, and if I run ANYTHING through it, it pixelates the heck out of the image in question.

Makes 'em look crummy.

So GIMP is my tool on the computer these days, and for the most part though I am still learning it, it suits me fine. I do wish I had better, but oh well. Make do, eh?

Okay, to the point. So I got my best shot of the background on a separate piece of paper than the best shot of the friend. It has been an unbelievably long time since that happened to me... usually I just throw graphite onto a page and call it done. Sometimes I try with more than one piece of paper... and yes, I know they say "throw away your erasers"... but I am an efficient type, and I just can't let mine go. So I erase, too. But that's not the point.

I thought to myself... "oh, this isn't such a big deal. I'll just scan them both in, and use GIMP to make the two as one!" So I scanned them in, transferred them via my chip from mom's compy to mine, and got right to work.

I will say this much... it worked more beautifully than I could possibly have hoped for. That image was absolutely superb... in as much as I didn't do anything to it to change its "pencilly" format. It still looked like a drawing. But it looked like a good drawing... and like it was all ONE drawing. Not two combined ones.

I was really proud of myself. Well I was happy to leave it grayscale, at least for the time being, so I started to add things like shading, and contrast, and I was just starting to go in and blot up holes in the lines where coloring was bleeding through (like where the wall and the purse became the same color suddenly) when something terrible happened.

I was about 98% done with this baby - all 98% of it as pure perfection as it gets - when

Dun

Dun

Dun

MY COMPUTER FROZE AND I LOST EVERYTHING!!!

So now I'm kicking myself for not saving it periodically as i worked, and kicking the computer for doing that to me. I swear... if my laptop has caught the rheumatics, it's news to me. It has never froze up like that EVER EVER before.

AND THE TIMING!!! Why then?? Why on that project?? It was PERFECT!!!

WAH!

So yeah... my is not happy. *shrug* I don't know, maybe I thought you wanted to know that. I'll probably feel better in the morning, and will go and do it over again, and hopefully this next time my progress will yield something I can show for all the effort.

In the meantime...

Me out.
-AE