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Participant
January 4, 2022
Question

Cannot work on my illustrations it seems locked

  • January 4, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 1714 views

I work on an ipad. I have one illustration larger thant the others but cannot open it. Sometimes it is viewable but cannot be edited and sometimes it comes up on a black screen . I found the layers are still there and when I lock them the image appears but smaller and still cannot be worked on.None of the contorls work - it seems as if the file is too big and stops illustrator working. I have just been playine with it and it is a total disaster now - even worse all the coloursing has shifted from the original line drawing. It also cannot be exported as the wheel of death just spins round and round and I have to close the program.

For the smaller illustrations I drew it all works fine. Please help me get my illustration back so I can finish it- thanks!

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2 replies

Monika Gause
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 4, 2022

Can you still open the AI file in Illustrator on the desktop?

Just how large is it? How many layers?

Smizzlez23
Inspiring
January 4, 2022

I recently went through a month of disaster because my Illustrator was running extremely slow. I too got the spinning wheel of death. The Illustrator file was also dynamically linked to Character Animator. The document cause both programs to run slow, freeze, and crash.

 

I thought it was my graphics, I thought it was my hardrive, I thought I was my system. 

 

I just found out that it was because the size of the file was so big that I had to make certain layers invisible so that the Illustrator program wouldn't read that heavy layer and have the other layers competing for the programs attention too.

 

Maybe you can try that. Clicking the little eye on a some of your heavier layers and turning them off.

Participant
January 11, 2022

Thanks for the reply. If I turn off the heavier layers the image comes out of the black screen but the problem is I cannot use it. If I could export it as one piece maybe it loses all the layers and is a smaller file so I could complete it?  It is my first time to use  illustrator and I imported a sketch I drew and coloured in with over 350 layers (I was coloruing in flowers each different colour) Maybe there is another way of doing it but I thought I could just add more and more as I would with a real paint brush. Thanks for any advice

 

Participant
January 11, 2022