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

hey wonderful people it's genevieve and if you don't know me my goal is to teach you all about illustration and design if you're new on this channel make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of the videos and so that you can join the wonderful community that we have going on across social media and with that said let's just jump in [Music] in this video i'm going to be answering the question that i get by far the most often which is how do you know which scan the size to choose when you're creating digital art i know this subject can be a little bit 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 answer the question by painting a big picture so that you can easily understand and create your own canvas and make sure you stick around until the end of the video because i'm going to give you a few pro tips of what you need to know for posting on social media as well as a little thing that you need to 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 take this little coil out here and we zoom in quite a lot we're going to start seeing a bunch of little squares and those little squares are what we call pixels so you can think of images as being mosaic with tiny tiny tiny pieces one great thing about these little squares is that we can't count them so the dimensions of an image is really just how many pixels there are in it so for example here on the left we would have an image that is 5x5 and on the right we would have an image that is 10 by 10. just a little note here by convention the first number you give out is the width of the image and then the second number is the height of the image [Music] but what happens if we bring in a secondary unit of measurement well this is really where it gets super interesting and this mostly applies to print so let's say that we use our 10 by 10 square again and we also say that now it 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 that we cannot just go in and squeeze in more pixels in that 1 by 1 inch square so for the same surface area we now have a 20 pixel per 20 pixel image and that's what resolution is that's how many pixels there are in one little unit of surface area and in general the more pixels there are the better quality of the image so now that we've covered all the basics we can actually circle back to the original question which was how do you choose a canvases for that you have to ask yourself one very important question which is the object i'm creating do i want to be on screens only or do i also want to print it if it is only for screen it is super easy just worry about the dimensions you can forget about resolution that's not important for you so whatever you see on your screen is pretty much what other people are going to see on their screen as well if you are not zoomed in or zoomed out of course so if you're looking at your image at a 100 and if you're creating your image for screen only my guess is you want to post it on social media which is great but there are a few more things that you need to keep in mind in that case if you are posting on social media just know that they actually compress the image before putting them out so whatever you see on for example facebook or instagram is never going to look quite as good as what you created for example in photoshop or procreate so that is not you that is just how it is and that sucks another thing that you have to keep in mind is the ratios so what a ratio is very quickly it's just pretty much the proportion of the width of the image and the height of the image i would say there are pretty much two ratios that you need to memorize and it's super easy so for facebook and instagram mostly it is either square so a ratio of one by one or rectangle that is four the width is four and then the height is five what do you recommend in terms of pixel because the ratio right now that would be just the tiniest image if you actually did an image that is four by five pixel don't do that what these um instagram and facebook recommend is to have at least a width of 1080 pixels so if it is a square you would have 1080 per 1080 if it is a rectangle it would be 1080 for the width and then the height would be 1350 pixels i personally 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're working on it so that you can zoom in or crop some parts without losing too much quality in the creative process once you're ready to export and post it you could then scale it down to 180 but you don't even really need to worry about that because like i said social media will compress your images themselves if you want to print your image you're also going to need to consider resolution so if we go back to our definition of resolution in print as being simply the number of pixel for a specific unit of measurement then it becomes really easy to pick a canvas size for print as well so the first thing you need to know is that there are a lot of conventions when printing which makes everything really easy for example resolution is usually calculated for print in dpi which means dot per inch and we say dot in print because it's a dot of ink on a paper instead of a pixel on the screen but you can just think of it as being pixel per inch so for the best print quality you would usually aim for 300 dpi you can go as low as 150 dpi but you're going to start seeing some not as great results and you would definitely not want to go below 150 dpi so i recommend you aim for 300 if that's possible and all that means is if you're trying to find which canvas size to create in pixel for a print product you're just going to take the dimensions of the final print in inches and you're going to multiply that by 300 which is going to give you the number of pixels so for example let's say you want to print on a regular letter sized paper so an 8.5 inch by 11 inch piece of paper you would simply multiply 8.5 by 300 and also 11 by 300 which would give you the dimension in pixels of 2550 by 3300 pixels i have one last little project for you if you are a procreate user you've probably already noticed that there is a limited number of layers that you can create in one canvas that number depends on two things the first thing is the capacity of your ipad so the memory the strength in some way of your ipad you cannot change that that is out of your control it depends on which ipad you purchase the second thing you do have control over and that is the dimensions and the resolution of your canvases so for example if you create a really big canvas and you want to print it so it is a 300 dpi canvas you're probably going to be able to use only a handful of layers if you are appropriate user you might consider creating images for print at 150 dpi just so that you can have enough layers i know it's not the best resolution but you're still going to get really great results and it's going to be way less frustrating to draw and just not have to juggle with just like five layers for your creation so that is one way you can go around that if you do want to have a whole lot of layers and still work at 300 dpi or if you can best the dimensions are just insanely big you can use a few tips and i'm not going to get into too much detail here because that is kind of too much for this specific video but you can create separate canvases so for example one for the background and one for the main character and have them be the same dimensions of course and then you kind of just like copy the canvas for the background and import that in your character as just one flat layer so that is one tip that you can do if you are someone who know that you know you know you you like to use a bunch of layers and i am totally guilty of that so so yeah there is nothing more complicated than that now you should be able to create any kind of size for any project that you are working on if you enjoyed this video make sure to give it a thumbs up because it really does help the channel believe it or not and before you leave don't forget to subscribe because i put out new videos every single week i'll see

Channel: Genevieve's Design Studio

Views: 34,713

Keywords: how to choose a canvas size, how to pick a canvas size, What is the best image size for social media, procreate canvas size for printing, what is the best canvas size for procreate, procreate canvas size, photoshop canvas size, digital art canvas size for prints, resolution for printing, what is a pixel in image, procreate canvas size for digital art, what is resolution, instagram image size, digital art for beginners, digital art, canvas size, canvas size for digital art, pixel

Id: 209K7V09pEM

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021