Rotten to the Core

This is an unfinished illustration I’ve been working on. My main aim was to work with an exceptionally large image size (1485 x 2100 mm), in order to determine how practical it is to work at large scale with Adobe Illustrator. I guess it was successful in that I discovered it isn’t really practical - I reached some sort of limit, and Illustrator convulsed in agony and attempted to destroy the file. Luckily I was able to recover most of it (you might find procedures like this helpful if you’re ever in a similar scenario), but obviously I’m going to have to investigate alternate ways to work on this image - likely greater integration of Photoshop into the creation process. My questionable overuse of symbols and feather effects probably played a large part in creating this problem, and I’m sure there would be no problem working on this scale if you didn’t insist on having tens of thousands of objects for the program to render. Unfortunately, in this instance, Illustrator was unable to comply with my cruel demands. I’ll follow up with a post about whatever method I end up using to finish this picture, when I find the time to do so.