Chore day, Oct 16, 2022 Back to page 50 one more time

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Today’s chores were the same as last week’s chores: vacuuming the house and doing the laundry. Why do I do the same chores every week? Because the deal is that I do the laundry and vacuuming and my partner does the week’s grocery shopping. We split the chores and we’re both happy with what we have to do. She likes to shop and I like to vacuum and do laundry. In fact, I have a history of doing extreme manual labor. I worked manual labor jobs from the age of 13 to 55 and preferred it that way. I wanted work that didn’t take much thinking and left me free to focus on writing novels.

Cleaning up the cover image

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Today I spent my time cleaning up the many layers in my cover image. I have some layers that use normal mode, and many layers that use multiply mode. The normal mode layers have an unfortunate white background, which I want to remove. I want them to have transparent backgrounds. My strategy is to place an orange layer below each of the normal layers. As I manually erase the white background, the orange layer will show through and I’ll be able to see any white spots that I’ve missed. When I’ve got all of the white background removed, I can delete the orange layer.

I tried using Procreate’s “automatic” selection tool to select all of the white pixels, but it seems to work only with contiguous pixels, leaving enclosed islands of white everywhere. I decided that doing the cleanup manually would give me better results.

The image below shows what I see as I’m deleting the white background. This is an 8000x4000px image with lots of nooks and crannies — I’ve got a lot more work to do.