Visualization of a Headache

Recently I was in the middle of working on thumbnails for a project I'm working on. I was about a full-day in on this--I'm very, very slow in the thumbnailing stage. I've shown thumbnails here before, so you know that I typically do them in Painter. So I was doing that, and decided to save my work before having lunch. As the program was saving the multi-layer file, I switched over to check my email. When I looked down a few seconds later at my taskbar, I saw that Painter was no longer there. My stomach dropped.

Painter crashes as often as anything, and when it does it usually just goes *poof*, without a word. However, once every year and a half or so since I got it, it goes *poof* while saving. That's bad. I quickly dug open the file, to be presented with....

This is what a headache looks like

My multi-layered file became this single layer image. Completely corrupted. Toast. A day of work, gone. This has always happened, thankfully, while working in preparatory stages. I don't do a lot of final illustrations digitally--I can't imagine the whimper of hopelessness that would've escaped me had I been a week into a huge digital illustration.

It turns out that I hadn't had many good ideas yet anyway--I was just feeling like I was getting going when this happened. Still, it completely ruined my day. And this is the second computer this has happened on. I also avoid using "Watercolor Layers" because they crash Painter IX (WinXP) so often.

When I got my head back on a couple hours later (it really did mess me up), I grabbed my trusty pad and pencil and got back to work the old-skool way. After having tried a full-digital setup for a short time, bit by bit I'm stepping back from it, using it exclusively for things I can't do traditionally. I can thumbnail traditionally. Maybe I'll continue doing so.