Disasters and other funny tragedies

[jessicasurline]

I haven't seen anything like this yet but I would love to hear the funny stories you guys have about when things went wrong on a project.

For example, I always tell myself never to eat or drink near my working area because you know what will happen...Well, what did I do? I was drinking some flavored water thing at work right next to a character sheet I was making. I just started to ink the thing when I reached over to grab the can. I rolled a 1 for Accuracy and Dexterity...

Since I work all traditional I had to either start over completely or roll with it. So I rolled with it. Fortunately for me, this woman meets an untimely death in the sotry so it kinda works.

Let me hear some of your grand mishaps on the road of creation!

[MaiStarberries]

That is some brilliant improvisation right there. I work digitally so most of my mistakes can be fixed thanks to layers and the good ol' "undo" button but I've had some weird occasions. One instance on an old comic was when I applied a gradient fill tool by accident when I meant to use bucket fill, and all of my characters turned a weird blue-stripe gradient. I took a screenshot of that but I dunno if I still have it.

Additionally though, back when I used to work with Paint Tool SAI as my art program, it started at some point giving me this weird error when saving an image, so I would have to save the image multiple times until it saved correctly. When I first got the error though, I wasn't sure what it was or what problem it was causing. I saved my file, got that error, figured there was something wrong with the file but I'd saved shortly before that as well so I decided to close the program and see what the heck was up. I then found that the save error had deleted that entire page that I had been working on. ;A;

I actually completely forgot about that until now, and forgot that switching to Manga Studio has freed me from that.

[joannekwan]

So for my main job (not that I'm making much money from it, it's just my biggest time commitment overall) I illustrate two comic series for an indie comic publisher. One of their most popular series is for kids (8-12) and I do all the artwork for it. For the second issue, I forgot to turn off the sketch layer before exporting the file.

It made it to print. (–_–)
They didn't notice, but NEVER AGAIN.

[Menbung]

Oh god I wish you could have seen my face when I saw your "tiny mistake". But to tell you the truth it gave the final piece an awesome look.

I work traditionally just as you, this happened very recently, I was working on a guest art and I drew 3 illustrations, when I was going to ink the one I liked the most I ran out of ink, so I opened a bottle that a friend of mine gave me as a present, when I tested the ink, it was too thin, wow, it was almost water, and I was thinking that the deadline was coming closer, so I let the bottle of ink open to let it dry a bit.

I waited almost a day, the thing got better but not to the consistency I like, it was thin and it took a little more time than I'm used to to dry (it's time to mention that the paper I used was thin too, so that thing could break in any minute).

So I said, f*ck it, I'm gonna ink with this I can't lose anymore time, I went inking with it and everything was fine, until I remembered that this thing took longer to dry. When I took my hand off the paper and saw a big ink splatter on the character's shoulder..................................... my heart stopped for a minute.... I was like oh sh*t I ruined this............

Gladly I covered it up making some lines thicker, but since we don't have an undo button, inking is like walking on a tightrope @_@

[jessicasurline]

Oh man! I hate that heart stopping feeling when ink suddenly is where it shouldn't be! Especially when I really am happy with the drawing and messing up the ink means starting the whole process over again! I'm glad you were able to be flexible and save the image!

[jessicasurline]

For anyone who does digital:
Who else has saved out an image for online but forgot to save this smaller version as a copy? I've done this more times than I can count! I get so depressed to see all that high rez work crumpled into small jagged pixels.

[winglesscomic]

I was working on a WIP for this image so I made it smaller and exported it to show my progress. Unfortunately I forgot to undo the resize and saved over...no backups..... like a fourth of the size it actually was...

I had to work in THAT SIZE for the rest of the picture, fuck me

[joannekwan]

Ooh, I hate when that happens! I usually go "fuck it," and blow up the image again and rework it to hide the resolution issue.

[purrlpankras]

When you so "In the zone" You start drawing on the background layer, and only realise when you start to colour it in.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF...

[Raven_C]

Omg YES. Ughh i accidentally did that once or twice. So frustrating >:(

[Kura]

Most of my disasters are caused by animals.

Traditional
Cats- When I worked traditional it was that jumping/running over my work while fresh out the litterbox with pee or runny poo on their paws.

Dogs- Rest their head on my stuff and drool. Or run around with drawing pad and then think it's a GREAT idea to play tug of war with it it.

Guinea Pigs and Birds- They eat my drawings.

Digital
Cat or Dog - Jump, walk over, sit on, lay on rest head on keyboard and hit the delete key a thousand times in the process or do SOMETHING so many times that it becomes irreversible causing me to go back to the last save (if saving or corrupting the file10000 times wasn't one of the things they did) or start all over again from the beginning.

[justjezz]

Omg. When I read this, I felt my heart break. xD

[allenthomas]

Well not that this is a mega problem like others, but when I started my first pages of Shadosassins I broke my old tablet and spent a while drawing with a mouse. Yeah, very frustrating but I have a new one. All is well with the world.

[SpavVy]

Project not saving correctly and I needed to redraw the entire page last night -_- wanted to punch a wall.

[goenn]

I feel you... one time I was painting and I was so close to it being finished...! Then SAI decided that it wanted to kick the bucket and crashed ; --- ; All my progress... poof....

And so, because of that incident, I save all the time.

[Aspie_Gamer]

One time I for whatever reason decided to shut down my computer while I still had MS5 open (not to mention I forgot to save!). Boy was I frustrated with myself when I realized what I had done!