getting detail

[ladyc]

Hello, I am new to your art forum and digital art. I am impressed by Hotduck's detail work. I have a Wacom Intuos 2 and cordless pin, Photoshop 7, Illustrator and Painter 5. I use Photoshop most of the time. I have always done a little art along, but since I found digital art and Photoshop, I am an addict. Could someone give me some pointers on how to achieve tiny detail work with digital art?

[Kress]

zoom in

[sic1]

Use a very small brush or small custom brushes...and be sure to take your time! Rome wasn't built in a day you know :)

[ladyc]

I have been using small brushes and zooming in. I found out that if I use a large size to begin with and zoom down when finished it works better. I think I was using too small of a image size to start with. Thanks for the replies.

[whatzabuzz]

If you are new to digital rendering, and you haven't figured it out yet, you need to become aware of file sizes and resolution - forget about inches, points, cventimeters, etc, these are print sizes, what you are looking for here is the pixel count - the two are related but not the same.

The higher the pixel count the greater the resolution - the default for a lot of graphics programs is 76 pixels per inch, which is not going to give you much detail - I sometimes do roughs at this resolution but to get any detail you need to up the pixel count - there will usually be an option for this on the resize option.

Go up to 200 dpi or better - 200 dpi is about the maximum you want for web work, anything larger slows down the loading considerably on dial ups - work that is going to the printers you will want to be at least 300, or more typically, 400 dpi - find out from the publisher what resolution they require, it may be even more.

You can get quite a lot of detail at 400 dpi, and at this point you will need to think about the print sizes again, inches, points, etc.

Illustrator typically defaults to 800 dpi, and this will give you pretty smooth fonts at magazine size - 9x12 or so - the trade off being that the larger the files size the slower your computer and apps will work - you need to stuff as much memory into your computer as you can get.

My barely adequate computer system has been know to lock up or crash when working at higher resolutions with too many layers, etc. so save often if you have an older machine.

As I say, I often begin the rough work at lower resolutions, laying in large color blocks, etc., then up the resolution to a higher dpi, and do more detail, and so on - I find this is faster and I get better results.

Hope that helped, and I didn't just tell you things you already knew.

[ladyc]

Thanks Whatzabuzz,
That is exactly what I was wondering. I knew the settings had a lot to do with it but did not know what I should set them to. All I knew was I was zooming in and things would get too distorted to be able to achieve really good detailart I have plenty of memory and speed. Thanks again. This will help.

[KayCustomz]

ohz