I Must Be Doing Something Right

I know I’m being pro­duc­tive when my hard dri­ve runs out of space. 

Open Stu­dios is hap­pen­ing in anoth­er month and a half, and I don’t have any­where near as much work ready as I’d like. Get­ting prints made and framed requires a bit of lead time, so it’s not just a mat­ter of get­ting more ink down on paper. My dead­lines are draw­ing very very near. You can eas­i­ly imag­ine how frus­trat­ing it is then to have my machines show me their lim­i­ta­tions. Yet at the same time, run­ning up against the lim­its of my devices means I’m push­ing the lim­its of what’s pos­si­ble, at least on some level.

Tonight as I was edit­ing a file in Pho­to­shop, I got an error mes­sage I haven’t seen in some time. When I attempt­ed to cre­ate a sec­ond lay­er in the file I’m work­ing on, I was told that the oper­a­tion can­not be com­plet­ed because my scratch disks are full.

I hes­i­tate to even won­der what my vir­tu­al mem­o­ry files look like right now, but clear­ly I need to free up some space. I’m work­ing on a hand-built screen for a large-for­mat lux­o­graph­ic. What that means is that I’ll be over­lay­ing a hand-drawn (or at least hand-mod­i­fied in this case) pat­tern over the indi­vid­ual chan­nels of a col­or-sep­a­rat­ed pho­to­graph to cre­ate an organ­ic ver­sion of a halftone screen. Or in even sim­pler terms, I’ll be mak­ing a pic­ture from a col­lec­tion of lines.

Since I won’t be let­ting an image proces­sor do the work of build­ing those lines, I have to cre­ate an image at the res­o­lu­tion of my out­put device. Since I’m cre­at­ing an image near­ly six feet wide, that’s a lot of pix­els. Since even that does­n’t give me enough res­o­lu­tion to cre­ate the illu­sion of smooth col­or tran­si­tions, I have to over­sam­ple the orig­i­nal image, apply the screens, and then down­sam­ple to end up with antialiased lines to be used as screens.

The upshot is that the file I’m work­ing with right now, which con­tains only one of four col­or chan­nels, is a four giga­byte file. When I save my changes to the file, I can get up and go make cof­fee and come back to find the file still sav­ing. Believe me, those quad-proces­sor machines are look­ing real­ly tempt­ing these days. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the last time I spec’ed out a com­put­er for myself, the total came to twen­ty thou­sand dol­lars. That’s about nine­teen thou­sand, nine hun­dred and nine­ty-eight more dol­lars than I have in my wal­let right now.

Still, it gives me a small feel­ing of pride to know that I’m tax­ing my com­put­ers so heav­i­ly. I sup­pose if cre­at­ing large pieces of art­work was easy, every­one would be doing it, right? So I real­ly don’t feel all that frus­trat­ed as I back files up to DVDs to clear off space from my hard dri­ve. The only thing that real­ly both­ers me is that I’m attempt­ing some­thing that I don’t know will work. If it does, I’ll have three more chan­nels to work with. If it does­n’t, I get to start over look­ing at how to approach this piece.

Yes, we are hav­ing fun yet.