she must have used a ton of layers...

I did use layers in making this (in order not to mess up the bits that looked okay, while trying to figure out how the tool worked), and wound up with about 5 or 6 when I had to save -- apart from the ones I deleted in the course of trying to figure out the tool, before it froze on me. I looked desperately for a guide to the tool, so that I could learn in any way other than just experimenting with it -- I am eagerly looking forward to seeing even a minimal guide to the "dos and don'ts" of using Lascaux, though I know that it's a lot to ask of someone making a volunteer effort in creating this tool in the first place. Still, you mentioned something about points for articles -- isn't there a chance that one of the more experienced users could put some notes together to save us rank beginners from making mistakes and risking incurring the wrath of the more experienced users of the site?

Also, can anyone tell me if Lascaux saves something more than just the images on each of the existing layers when it saves an image? I don't want to eat your drive space, I'd rather read up more on how the tool works, if you can suggest anywhere that I can go to learn more about what does and doesn't cause problems for the tool.

For what it's worth, I'd intended to flatten this out to fewer layers when I was done with the image, but since the applet froze and wouldn't let me draw, I thought a safety save was in order, and didn't get a chance. Would flattening the layers have helped to save file space, or would changing the number of levels of "undo" available? What can I do to optimize file sizes when working with Lascaux? Could this have something to do with why the tool siezed up on me, so that I could no longer draw with it? It just seems odd to me that this could be why it would sieze on an image that size, when I can work on a 50 meg image in Paint Shop Pro on the same machine, without crashing.

Can someone please help orient this baffled new user before I wind up abandoning a rather nifty seeming new tool out of fear of causing problems?

I'm like you, baffled as to how to use the layer feature ...all of my submissions are a single layer, I agree that there should be some instuctions somewhere...then again it is great to see how each artist uses his or her talents with the tools in their own ways. I think that the computer savvy have an edge on the computer illiterate like me.btw your fish is pretty cool as is

Well, I can't edit this piece (which I just now tried to do in order to reduce the amount of space used), and I don't know what else to do; so... <sighs> ...unless advised otherwise, I'm going to delete it, in order to stop violating the space limit per image. I'm going to give this a couple of hours and see if I get any guidance from a moderator as to what to do, but failing that, the fishy (ack, children's books are taking over my vocabulary) will swim into history on my online sketchbook page. <sigh> I'm really sorry about the space problem, folks. :(

Isn't there a way to check the amount of space that the file is taking before you allow the user to save the file, so that we *can't* get into this kind of trouble? I think it told me the size of the .PNG file (though I'm honestly not sure), but not the actual main file, the one that's violating the space limit -- and I always feel really awkward about creating a problem I didn't even know how to check for, much less how to avoid, prevent, remedy, anything. <worried look> Do I just create images and hope blindly that they're within the size limit when I'm done, and delete them if they're not, or is there something I can do to avoid this problem in the future?

I wouldn't worry about it so much, 2draw isn't really about how many mb you're using... we shouldn't be running out any time soon.

Well then, in that case, I think I'll just mark this piece as finished, since I can't edit it any more. I've set a tight limit on my undo history on Lascaux, and I think I'll try another piece and see if I can avoid these file size problems that way. Thanks!

Actually you probably want to set it much higher... the default is pretty low. Undo size has nothing to do with what's sent to 2draw, that's just how much of your computer's ram is used to store undo information.