resizing, recalculating, readjusting

I just spent two and a half hours working on a project in illustrator. it was an ambitious project. there multiple layers, a specific spectrum of colors, quite a few circles... it was an attempt to do justice to a doodle that is my current twitter background, to make it look less like a scanned pdf and more like a real digital image. but it became more than that, since that scanned image is a doodle that I used for quite a few things this year, one that is very representative of my artistic style. so I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the stroke weights and colors and sizes and layout to match perfectly, and I'd imagine I made a good 200 circles of all sizes. I grouped layers, I moved things around, I found a brushstroke that didn't look super trite or tacky. I only broke for quick emails and questions from my boss' admin.

the file, my little homage to my favorite 2D piece to-date!, ended up being 65MB.

SIXTY. FIVE. MEGABYTES.

obviously lacking the computer memory to even pretend to make it into something I could save in any form, and currently lacking the know-how to drastically reduce such a file without a) starting over or b) chopping it up like hell, I printed it and deleted the illustrator file outright.

a simple fix; a simple, depressing, defeating fix.

I will frame the fucking print-out.

I justify time spent on such a project because, while the serious job paid for me to learn some photoshop and indesign basics, illustrator has been an adventure in projects at the silly job and self-teaching. I've come pretty far for a year, but it feels like I don't actually learn things in a productive way, or at least in a style I would need (classroom) to actually learn the basics. it's been rather piecemeal to this point. but, again, I justify completing online tuts and creating random stuff because illustrator entirely more useful for what I'm often asked to do here... and it's also usually a nice break.

but this deleted project is absolutely the most work I've done all day. I'm not hungover, I'm not sick, I'm not all that tired, I'm not hungry. I'm just not mentally here. I have things I definitely should be doing, but I'm already in the weekend. or at least the weekend-prep stage.

the thing is, I feel like today is the [low point, turning point, outlier] in a journey of a few weeks. somewhere in the last six weeks I have retreated. (regressed? no. probably not. I think.) the best way I can describe it is that I have become smaller, like somewhere the bounce in my step flattened and my shoulders sank with it. like somewhere all of my ambitious steps, no matter how big or small, are being met as above.

and I can't quite come up with a simple fix; a simple, uplifting, encouraging fix.