Any artist worth his salt (which poor Thag will tell you isn’t the best renumeration, having added thirst to hunger after the consumption of his life savings) should have an untouched digital original somewhere, just as a photographer who uses film saves his negatives.

The option to start again from the original and rework the image for a new output device, or to fix an image that was incorrectly prepared, may be needed only rarely as said artist gains experience. However, when it is needed, having that option can mean the difference between a job’s success or failure.

Andrew: Sorry I lost you there, but thanks for not asking. 8^)

Be that as it may, naturally you would save a copy of the original file and squirrel it away in a safe place. No need to worry about where that place is either. Squirrels hide things and then as they dig around in places they happen to find things that they had forgotten about. Too much organization can drive a person to distraction. The important thing is to save the original and not get mired down as to where, lest you fail to do it at all. It’s kind of freeing isn’t it? And think of the joy of stumbling across that lost file years later. You don’t get that thrill if you meticulously archive and catalog your work.

Now this all is pretty basic I realize. A person would have to be very shortsighted to fail in this area. From the experience of the first graphic artist, Thag, and his telling experience in the initial commercial venture of cave drawing we learn this lesson. It happened like this:

Thag was in his cave having just finished cooking and consuming whatever he could scrape off of the dinosaur superhighway passing his cave. Picking up the charcoal and red clay caked stick and leaning it against the cave wall Thag witnesses the first gradient and then, well, the rest is Prehistory! The locals came to see this new expression of the almost human spirit and soon commissioned him to replicate his work in their less ostentatious dwellings. Thag, lacking the tools and experience in graphic reproduction, chose to act on his first inclination. Thag learned here that first inclinations are normally the poorest choice. He took a large rock and started chipping away at the artwork. He gathered what fragments he could for filings transfer and reproduced his composition with what he had left. The artwork was smaller and the quality acceptable. The real difficulty came when he was commissioned for a larger rendition in the communal lodge. There were just not enough fragments left to reflect the original glory that all had reveled in back in Thag’s cave. Thag’s new found wealth and fame collapsed and he was doomed to fade into obscurity as the first starving artist.