How big do you like it?

I just started working in 1600x1200. Shrinking down is easier on the resolution than enlarging, I've found.

Lately I've been rendering at 984 x 728 so I can add a 20-pixel border to it in post, resulting in a 1024 x 768 picture. This is mainly because I have a fairly small monitor, and that's the resolution I have it set at. Perhaps because of that, I figure that's the largest size that allows pretty much everyone to be able to see the whole picture without re-sizing it, and I always prefer to view a piece in its original resolution. I know some people who are good enough to do commissions, though, that do much higher-resolution finals. But for me, that seems the right size.

I like to work big! I render and postwork at 1600x1200 then shrink down. I'm all about the details so its easier to work bigger for me then I can reduce or crop as needed.

I also work at 1600x1200. I find it is tons easier to postwork at that size.

Well, clearly I need to change my ways. :???: I've always tended to render in the size I want the final pic to be, cause I don't trust resizing to not degrade the quality. Looks like I need to change my thinking.

Well, that's why I'm here, is to learn.

*nod* I did that FF exchange render for my sig in 1600x1200, will finish the full sized piece sometime this week and will see how I like it. I imagine itll become the norm for me and ill be converting :)

Depends what I'm doing with the image. If i plan on doing hair postwork, I prefer to render really large ( 2k+ px wide/tall ) so when I shrink it you can't see how bad I actually suck at painting hair.

Otherwise on average is ~ 1200 height/width.

The Sharpen tool ( not to be confused with Filter > Sharpen ) is REALLY fuckin nice when you size down and want to crispen up a few areas ( i always run it over hair / eyes / lips )

when i render a poster-sized picture i usually render it in 6400x4800 Pixels (or vice versa)
and in 120 DPI.
Desktop Resolution varies between 1280x800 and 1280x1024 at 96 DPI.

Not a 3D artist, but I always work big and size down later. I work at 300dpi and usually the canvas size is a minimum of 1000px width/height. Even with my screenshot work I blow up the toon to 300dpi, do the repaint, and size down later to put in the sig/magelo. It's just so much easier to do the detail work on a higher resolution canvas. Also, when you size down it helps to hide little imperfections that you can't seem to get rid of.

Im with Merreck. I alwasy start at print resolution (300 dpi) and reduce the final to a more managible size with my freehand. I increase the size for my screenshots if I'm working with EQ1 or WoW. I use the screenshots just as they are out of the game in EQ2, the graphics are good enough.

My moniter is 1280 by 1024, I used to have an old moniter that couldn't handle anything more than 800x 600. I used to do my work in CM's...*cough* til I got new moniter and realised when I was uploading stuff that they were huuuuuge, and friend was going nuts at all the space I was using. But higher resolution definately helps the quality imo.

If I'm working for a desktop I usually work at roughly 1.5 times the finish size. Usually 2400 x 1800 for a standard ratio or 2160 x 1350 for my own widescreen desktops. I try to render as huge as my machine will handle just so I can have larger pieces to use when I do close ups or insets in a sig/desktop

I just scan in my pencils at 300 dpi (no particular reason -- I just know more dpi means bigger size in photoshop) and they will end up around 2000 pixels high, give or take some. When I do art, I do it with the goal of making it a wallpaper first and foremost so I always want my characters to be bigger than say ... 1024 by 768 for sure. That way I can just shrink them down later on and if I need to "fill" space, I can always do it with a faded out version of the larger scan (the face area, for example).

I don't understand why people need larger desktop resolutions (I like 1024 juuuust fine, heh), but if they specify a really big desktop, I'll make sure my scan ends up being bigger than that, for sure. Otherwise, they're getting a 1024x768 from me! ;)

I do admit to having problems when I have to shrink something that big all the way down to avatar or sig size. It's just not as clean. I'd either have to make my lines insanely thick from the get-go or redo the lines on the smaller version or say fuck it, don't care anymore.

i'm still working this one out - switching to a widescreen has really thrown alot of things so it's intersting to see the various sizes used and gives me ideas for test renders.... and that said, i usually do what i call my mini-test renders - the one's where i've done a bunch of changes and want to see if they're even close - pretty small, say 600 x 600 and maybe 100dpi just so i can get it rendered fairly quickly so i don't break teh flow of what i'm doing. toward the end i go at least 1500 x 1200 just so i have lots of kill off space and can downsize.

and lessa - i damn near fell of my chair when i read the title of this - talk about an attention getter!!

No kidding! I can do fine with a medium size sig or av... but I see people who are able to create little teeny images, like web site banners, that look really good and detailed. I am totally blown away by it. How do they do it?! lol When ever I shrink my characters down small it always looks like complete crap. This is exactly why the vast majority of my sigs only show the chest up. :P

One of the wonderful things about working with vector is infinite scalability. For example, the little turtle on my DA page (shameless plug, hahaha) started out at about an inch high. Then I scaled it up to wallpaper size with no problem.

When I'm not doing vector, though, I like to work huge. With photo manips I work as big as my photo resolutions will allow and when I'm just painting I like to work at a good print size - 11 by 17, 300dpi. I'm not sure what that is in pixels :X. It's a little hard on my computer sometimes but I'm spoiled and also -hate- rendering something useless because it's not the right resolution. It usually gets cropped/scaled later.

What *i* do ( not saying my shrunken versions of things are all prettified, but its something i've done to lessen the ugly shrink-bug ) Is i resize my thing by about 50%, then run sharpen tool over say, the eyes/hair / other details. and then resize it a little bit more. Shrinking blurs your stuff out so the sharpening is just a halfway process of keeping it from being super blurred.

Ooo I will most definitely have to try that. Thanks for the tip, Vex!

thanks vex - that is a great tip! have had the same problem and that never would have occured to me!