

In general, all printed work should be a minimum of 300 DPI, but you can go higher if you plan to print posters and larger pieces of work. So, the larger the DPI, the more dots of ink will be in each inch of your printed final product. As the name suggests, it tells you how many dots can fit into an inch of printed work ( source). Choosing a DPI and How it Impacts Your Canvas SizeĭPI stands for dots per inch. There’s a reason for it though and it doesn’t actually impact your canvas size in the way you would think.

It’s really easy to get confused by DPI since it seems to magically balloon your canvas size.

Ok, another thing that’s important to understand is DPI. You still want to be in the ballpark, but be in the larger end of the ballpark. You’ll notice more quality loss when you scale a small image to a larger size than when you scale a large image to a smaller size. We’ve all played around with images, scaling them up and down to fit our needs.Įven if you don’t pick the perfect canvas size, you’ll be ok as long as you get in the ballpark. When In Doubt, Choose a Larger Canvasīefore we talk about the specifics of choosing the right canvas, it’s important to understand how much wiggle room you have. As we’ll talk about later, as long as you have your DPI set correctly, you only need to know either your pixel dimensions or your inches in order to setup your canvas. These are most of the standard print sizes, but if you need something different, check out this great Pixel-to-Print Size Calculator. Ok, but it isn’t really that simple because our canvas size isn’t all that matters. So, if you eventually want to print an 8×10 print, make your canvas 8×10. If you plan to print your work, it really is as simple as choosing a canvas that’s the size of your desired final product. The DPI of your canvas should be at least 150 for web work and 300 for print work. The size of your canvas designed for the web depends on the platform you plan to display it on. Use an inch to pixel converter to find your dimensions in pixels. So, the question is, what’s a good canvas size for digital art?įor printed work, your digital art canvas should be the same size as your desired final print. It’s so easy to choose the wrong sizing and make a mistake. But, what about digital art? The canvas is the size of my screen, whether it’s small or large. It’s easy to walk into an art store, see a canvas that will fit on that empty spot of the wall and know for certain that it’s the right size of canvas that you need.
