Working Size

I've worked at a lot of different original sizes over the years. The piece at right, done in August, 2007, was originally 3000 x 4000 pixels. Some of the others published here are at the scale at which they were originally drawn.

In the old, old hard copy days, artists worked at twice original size. I think some newspaper strip artists may have even worked larger than that. Working larger allowed artists to get more detail into their art and minimized imperfections as well.

When it comes to digital art created specifically for on-screen display, I'm not sure original size has any relevance. I've tried a lot of different sizes over the years.

The artist can always enlarge the art on the screen for detail work. You lose some granularity doing that, but if you actually work at a huge canvas size, you'll lose some detail in the rescaling process. So you lose either way.

My perception right now is that work I did fifteen years ago, on a more primitive computer and with a one-to-one original size, has more life and energy than some of the stuff I've done more recently with a larger canvas.