Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Thoughts on digital art....

I have been a fan of digital art for stampers and colorists since I discovered them many years ago.  I started with Make It Crafty in Australia.  I now use Saturated Canary, Sassy Cheryl, East Wind, Simply Betty, and Tickled Pink among others.  I love that I get instant satisfaction.  I can print in any size or color.  I can print on any paper, patterned or plain, water color.  I can create scenes with .png images without masking.  Versatile?  Yep.

But organization of 1.12 GB of files has been daunting.  I started out by putting them all in one folder so I could just scroll and see them all.  Then I got the crazy idea of sorting by artist so if I was in the mood for a Saturated Canary (which rocks, BTW) I could check the folder and print the image.  Then I developed thirty-five folders and sometimes I just didn't know what I wanted to color.  So, over the last three days, I went into every folder, added the artist's name to each image and moved it to my hard drive in one whopping big folder.  It took three days.  Some images only had a number, i.e. img 723, so I had to rename it something that made sense for searching.  I can now search for Halloween and every image from every artist that has Halloween in the name will show up.  Plus, I can just scroll until something jumps out at me.   As a result of all this hard work, I can see multiple images at once, the original files are on my  back-up drive so I won't lose them and all my images are on my hard-drive where I can take them with me when I travel (they had previously all been on my back-up drive) and each image has an artist attributed to it so I can give credit .  I also moved any Word, Corel Draw, Adobe Elements, Powerpoint, and Make the Cut files that related to the images.

So far I am very happy with this folder.  Using extra large icons or Microsoft Office Picture Manager, I can look at each image until I decide which image I want to work with.  I'll let you know how it works.

3 comments:

  1. I like the digital files because I can manipulate size but best of all flip them in the other direction if needed. Wouldn't even want to think about sorting or storing the clear and wood kind of stamps.

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  2. Glad you backed them up though - I made a horrible mistake and had mine on my laptop and it crashed. Lost everything. Luckly some I could redownload from the website I bought from but unable to download ones older then a year. Which really stunk!!! Your cards are awesome. Keep up the great work. Just descovered your site a couple days ago. I know this is an old post, but really wanted to comment.

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    1. Thumb drives are fairly inexpensive and a great way to back up digital images. So sorry to hear you lost some.

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