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.