Things to Consider When Starting a New Digital Canvas!

However, I believe there is a universal set of settings that you will need to consider as you begin your first serious digital painting.

As you load up your digital art program, it will or will not prompt you to start a new digital canvas. In those instances, just hit up file on the top bar and go to new. Again, this is dependent on the digital art program that you are planning to use.

So what are the commons settings to consider?

1. Resolution size

The best way to bring up the correct resolution for your canvas is to determine how many dots per inch can fit in your monitor. Now, depending on what types of monitor you have, it will vary.

But commonly, there are two types of sizes. An average monitor on a personal computer can hold 96 pixels per inch. However, if you’re running an Apple monitor, it will hold about 72 dots per inch.

The significance of having the correct pixel width is that it allows you to accurately guess your canvas size as it will appear in real life! Obviously, you can even fit 300 dots per inch if you wanted to, but the consequence is that your inch will be 3 inches long in real life!

Not very accurate representation of a digital canvas if you ask me!

On top of that, it’s best to change the properties of your monitor to the highest setting it is capable of. For example, most monitors these days can display an average screen resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels.

2. Canvas size

Digital painters like to work on big digital canvases! As a matter of fact, the bigger you go, the more details you fit in. Of course, the drawback is that it will suck up valuable system resources.

To counter that somewhat, you will either need a computer with a 1gb of ram, or a painting will very little information like reduced layers.

Of course, you should know your computer better than I can!

Personally, my computer isn’t that fast at all. Hence, the average resolution I work with is usually 3600 x 5400. That means the canvas it usually three to four times the size of my physical monitor!

For beginners, it’s common to start of with a smaller digital canvas. I would recommend 1200 x 1800 as a good launching point. This resolution will help you learn the limits of your computer as well as your program at an early stage.

When you feel comfortable, feel free to start on bigger digital canvases!

3. Color mode and background color

The last thing that you should consider is what type of colors to paint with. Commonly, there are three types: grayscale, RBG (red, green, blue), and CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key [black]).

Sometimes, your digital art program will have more than that like lab colors. However, I would pick either RBG, for human eyes, or CMYK, for printer colors, to work with.

You also will get a chance to pick the starting background color of your digital canvas. As we are painting, the best color would be a darken version of the color that suits your mood of your painting.

For example, if you are going to paint a landscape with a blue sky, I would recommend setting the background color to a dark and dull version of blue.

The reason for this is that you will always be drawing light. Light brings out details for you to work out whereas darkness masks details.

When you’re done choosing your color, submit it!

Once you click submit, your canvas will be generated in the digital art program. The last thing you need to learn is how to move around on your canvas.

Find the zoom in and zoom out tools of your program. As well, try to move around your canvas with a guiding tool. The most important point here is to move your canvas, while zoomed in, so you can still see the edge of the canvas.

This is because your tool bars will generally take the left and right part of your monitor, covering up the edges of the canvas. Hence, you will need to find a way to paint in those areas without distorting your tool bars.

This will save a lot of time as you would rather be using it on painting rather than moving tool bars around!

The rest is up your motivation as you begin your first brush stroke on your new digital canvas!

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