How To Choose A Canvas Size • All About Pixels, Dimensions, And Resolution • Digital Art & Print

Hello wonderful people, I'm Genevieve and if you don't know me my goal is to teach you everything about illustration and design, if you are new to this channel make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the videos and so you can join the wonderful community we have on the social networks and with that said, let's get into this video. I'm going to answer the question I get most often: how do you know what to scan?

size

to

choose

from when you are creating

digital

art. I know this topic can be a little overwhelming, especially if you're new to

digital

art, but don't worry, I'm not going to get into the technical stuff.

I'm just going to talk. Answer the question by painting a big picture so you can easily understand and create your own

canvas

and make sure you stay until the end of the video because I'll give you some pro tips on what you need to know. to post on social media, as well as a little thing you should keep in mind if you are a procreate user, okay, so we see images on the screen, but what are they made of? Let's say we pull out this little coil here and zoom in. In quite some time we will start to see a lot of little squares and those little squares are what we call

pixels

, so you can think of images as mosaics with little tiny pieces.

One great thing about these little squares is that we can't count them, so the

dimensions

of an image are actually how many

pixels

are in it, so for example here on the left we would have a 5x5 image and on the right we would have a 10 by 10 image. Just a little note here, by convention the first number you give is the width of the image and then the second number is the height of the image, but what happens if we incorporate a secondary unit of measurement ? Well, this is where it really gets cool. interesting and this applies mainly to

print

ing, so let's say we use our 10 by 10 square again and we also say that it now measures one inch by one inch, so we have the pixel measurement and we also have the inch measurement, well there's nothing that says we can't just go in and squeeze more pixels into that 1 by 1 inch square so for the same surface we now have a 20 pixel by 20 pixel image and that's the

resolution

i.e. , how many pixels there are in a small unit of surface area, and in general, the more pixels there are, the better the image quality, so now that we've covered all the basics, we can return to the original question, which was how do you

choose

a

canvas

?

A very important question is what is the object I am creating. Do I want it to appear only on screens or do I also want to

print

it if it is only for the screen? It's super easy, just worry about the

dimensions

, you can forget about the

resolution

or not. important to you so everything you see on your screen is pretty much what other people will see on their screen too if you're not zooming in or out of course if you're looking at your image at 100 and if you're creating your image to the screen, I'm just assuming you want to post it on social media, which is great, but there are a few more things you need to keep in mind in that case, if you're posting on social media, just know. in fact, they compress the image before publishing it, so anything you see on, say, Facebook or Instagram, will never look as good as what you created, for example, in Photoshop or Procreate, so it's not you, that's right and it sucks, another thing you need to keep in mind is proportions, so a proportion is very quick, it's roughly the ratio of the image width to the image height.

I would say there are pretty much two ratios you need. to memorize and it's super easy, so for Facebook and Instagram it's mostly square, so a one to one ratio or a rectangle is four, the width is four and then the height is five. What do you recommend in terms of pixels because the proportion is correct? Now, that would just be the smallest image, if you were to actually make a four by five pixel image, don't do that. What Instagram and Facebook recommend is to be at least 1080 pixels wide, so if it's a square, you would do that. have 1080 by 1080, if it's a rectangle it would be 1080 for the width and then the height would be 1350 pixels.

Personally, I would recommend if you are drawing to create an image that is at least 2,000 pixels wide when you are creating it and when you are working on it so you can zoom in or crop some parts without losing too much quality in the creative process, once you are ready to export it and publish it, you can reduce it to 180, but you don't even do that. I really need to worry about that because as I said, social media will compress your images on its own, if you want to print them you'll also need to consider the resolution, so if we go back to our definition of printed resolution as simply the number of pixels for a unit of specific measurement, then it is also very easy to choose a canvas

size

to print, so the first thing you need to know is that there are many conventions when printing, which makes everything really easy, for example the resolution.

It's usually calculated for printing in dpi, which means dot per inch and we say dot in print because it's a dot of ink on a paper rather than a pixel on the screen, but you can think of it as a pixel per inch to get the better impression. For image quality you would normally aim for 300 dpi, you can go down to 150 dpi, but you will start to see some not so good results and you definitely don't want to go below 150 dpi, so I recommend aiming for 300 if that's possible. and all that means is that if you're trying to find what size canvas to create in pixels for a printed product, you'll simply take the dimensions of the final print in inches and multiply them by 300, which is what I'll give you the number of pixels, so for example, let's say you want to print on a regular letter size paper, so on an 8.5 by 11 inch sheet of paper you would simply multiply 8.5 by 300 and also 11 by 300 which would give you the pixel dimension of 2550 by 3300 pixels.

I have one last little project for you. If you're a Procreate user, you've probably already noticed that there are a limited number of layers you can create on a canvas. That number depends on two things: The first is the capacity of your ipad, so the memory and power somehow of your ipad cannot be changed, that is out of your control, it depends on the ipad you buy. The second thing you do have control over is the dimensions and resolution of your canvases, for example if you create a really large canvas and you want to print it to be a 300 dpi canvas, you'll probably only be able to use a handful of layers, if If you are the right user, you can consider creating images to print at 150 dpi just to have enough layers.

I know it's not the best resolution, but you'll still get really great results and it will be a lot less frustrating to draw and not have to juggle. with only five layers for your creation so that's one way around it, if you want to have a lot of layers and still work at 300 dpi or if you can the dimensions are incredibly large you can use a few tips and I won't go into into too many details here because that's too much for this specific video, but you can create separate canvases, for example one for the background and one for the main character, and make them the same dimensions of course, and then just copy the canvas to the background and you import that into your character as just a flat layer so that's a tip you can do if you're someone who knows you know you know you.

I like to wear a lot of layers and I'm totally guilty of that, so yeah, it doesn't get any more complicated than that. Now you should be able to create any type of size for whatever project you are working on. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to give it a thumbs up because it really helps the channel, believe it or not, and before you leave, don't forget to subscribe because I post new videos every week.