Shrinking Massive Clip Studio Paint Pages into One Layer

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In my project to move my Clip Studio Paint files to iCloud so that I can import them into CSP on my iPad, I ran into a big problem. When I tried to upload a file from my desktop computer, I received an error message that said I could not save the rile to a remote device (iCloud) because the file was being used by another service. iCloud was updating the file after a CSP autosave. I would have to wait until iCloud had transferred the autosave version.

On the iPad, I ran into a problem when I tried to download a file: CSP locked up while the file was downloading, sometimes for many minutes. Uploading files from the iPad caused the same lockup.

When I examined the file sizes for my CSP files, the cause of the delays was obvious: the files were enormous. By “enormous”, I mean 458MB. The smaller files ranged from 180MB to 300MB. It would be unreasonable to expect that these files would move quickly from my desktop CSP to iCould to my iPad. It was painful.

To make the process snappier I simply flattened the files. The 458MB file became a 65K file. In fact, all of the flattened files ended up being about 65k. They uploaded quickly, opened quickly, saved quickly, and were available on my iPad in seconds.

The problem with flattening files is that I no longer have the layers necessary for making major changes to the images. To preserve that information, my strategy is to save that information before flattening the files. I copied the entire project to a drive on my computer. If I need to redo the inking or color, I have a the complete page, with all of its layers, available.

Keeping two versions of the file is extra complexity, but it’s workable.

Page 3 Revised

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It was a big day in Southern Oregon. I had my yearly checkup and I was pronounced healthy. Also, the plumbers replaced the pipesfrom our house to the city’s main line. The house was built in the 50’s, when Orangeburg pipe was commonly used. It has a life span of about 50 years — ours lasted 70. The replacement pipe is PVC, which will last up to 150 years. Long enough, I say.

To complete page 3, I enhanced the colors, added a walrus, and painted the circus tents in the distance.

Under the weather

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I’m not feeling great today. I haven’t eaten for the last 24 hours. The idea of eating is unthinkable. The cause…I’ve tracked it down to a bad bottle of very expired buffalo sauce.

Despite feeling like shit, I was able to finish page 15, which has been languishing in an incomplete state for over a year. In this picture we see that Jimmy and Betty have been rescued by a mysterious character, a dolphin.

Too Many Backup Locations!

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When I get paranoid about losing all of my work, I make a backup. My computer has a total of 6 hard drives, not counting iCloud, pCloud, and OneDrive. I have three complete backups for my third Jimmy Jay book. Each one is a snapshot of the book at a particular date. That’s all good…until I start revising my pages in the wrong location.

Today I realized that I had created a new page in one of the backups. Then it occurred to me that I may have created other pages in one of the other backups. I went a little insane and started examining all of the images in all of the backups.

After a couple of hours I found 2 pages that were not in the Real Working Directory. The silver lining to my panic is that I examined the size of every file, looking for signs that a file had been changed.Some of the files are more than 400GB in size. That’s because I use a shit ton of layers. I have to get rid of the unused layers. When a page is finished, there should be one layer for line work, one layer for colors, a layer for texture, one for shadows, and one for the background,

Morning in Lithia Park

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Taking my new 70-year old Leica for a photo shoot.

Sundays I’ve been going out mornings to take photos. My first excursions were to Lithia Park, which was designed by John McClaren, the man who designed San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

This fountain is the Butler-Perozzi Fountain, hauled all the way to the Pacific Northwest in 1915 from the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. It’s striking to think that an fountain carved in Italy would end up in what was then a an unknown logging town.

Pages 74 and 75, finished

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My deadline for finishing the drawings for book 3 is July 31. After that I’ll have three weeks to prepare the text and images for publication. I’ll use InDesign for laying out the pages and creating the PDF for Ingramspark. InDesign is a tough slog. I’ve forgotten everything I know about it. I last worked with it in February of 2021 when I completed my the second book in the fabulous “Adventures of Jimmy Jay” series.

Bigger Eyes are Cuter Eyes

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Thanks to the Clip Studio Paint liquefy tool, I was able to enlarge Kitty’s eyes in just a few seconds.

In the right page, I added in the birds perched on Mr. Moai and on Dylan’s snout. Adding the birds was necessary for continuity. They first appear in page 25, then reappear in page 59. I’ll add the birds to page 61, also, showing them fluttering around Mr. Moai’s head as Kitty revives him from his 300-year sleep.

Reviving an old sketch of the Easter Island Volcano Demon

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I’m going to find a place in the story for this image. The reader needs to know that the volcano demon’s rage is implacable and heartless. Overly dramatic? Oh, how can a fictitious volcano demon be overly dramatic? This beast has turned an entire island’s population, save for one boy, into stone statues.

The story needs a villain and the villain’s redemption, and that’s what it will get.

I'm moving my Clip Studio Paint files to iCloud

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I’d like to say that Clip Studio Cloud is really great, but it’s not. The upload speed, for me, is 0.05MP/sec, which means that large files, such as my 250MB pages with 70 layers, will never sync in my lifetime.

I wanted to use the CSP cloud so I could use Clip Studio Paint Ex on my iPad up to work on my book files. It seemed like the obvious thing to do, but what’s the point of having 100GB of storage when you don’t get the bandwidth necessary to move large image files.

My solution was to give up on the Clip Studio Cloud and put my 22GB of book files into the my iCloud account. Within an hour all of my files were shareable on my iPad. Problem solved.