Hmm. Still working in little fits and starts on that semi-painting of the taurgirl (who really should get a name someday). As I suspected, all the transparency I'm doing is making AI run slower and slower. I wish it had a feature found in Expression, where you can "freeze" a layer - it not only locks it for editing, but it renders a reasonably high-res bitmap of it to use in realtime display. It breaks the flow for a moment with a not-insignificant progress bar, but it makes future editing run a lot faster, as far less calculation has to be done.
As I write this, I think of ways to simulate it, that I may try - turn off in-progress layers, render out a tiff of the probably-finished layers, import that tiff and align it with the actual art, then hide the layers.
[ Addendum: Yes, this speeds up redraw. It's still going to get sluggish, but that can't be helped. It's also not doable for layers in front of everything, as AI won't export a TIFF with an alpha channel (can TIFFs have alpha? I'm not sure. Maybe Targa or PNG, but both of those are RGB-only formats, and I'm a CMYK kind of girl - and neither stores DPI information, which means I'd have to carefully resize the bitmap 'cause AI assumes 75dpi screen res, as I just discovered by making a 300dpi Targa), but I'm mostly working back-to-front on this, like a normal painting. It's another arrow in my quiver. ]
So far it's not as wildly chaotic as the photo paint-over that inspired me to experiment, it's more restrained and traditionally-painterly - but this may change.
Also, I did a couple pieces of very cute art destined for t-shirts; more news on that when the site they're for goes live.
As I write this, I think of ways to simulate it, that I may try - turn off in-progress layers, render out a tiff of the probably-finished layers, import that tiff and align it with the actual art, then hide the layers.
[ Addendum: Yes, this speeds up redraw. It's still going to get sluggish, but that can't be helped. It's also not doable for layers in front of everything, as AI won't export a TIFF with an alpha channel (can TIFFs have alpha? I'm not sure. Maybe Targa or PNG, but both of those are RGB-only formats, and I'm a CMYK kind of girl - and neither stores DPI information, which means I'd have to carefully resize the bitmap 'cause AI assumes 75dpi screen res, as I just discovered by making a 300dpi Targa), but I'm mostly working back-to-front on this, like a normal painting. It's another arrow in my quiver. ]
So far it's not as wildly chaotic as the photo paint-over that inspired me to experiment, it's more restrained and traditionally-painterly - but this may change.
Also, I did a couple pieces of very cute art destined for t-shirts; more news on that when the site they're for goes live.