hi

i use photoshop cs 5 for drawing but i think my canvas is too big to draw in and usually i use half of it so i zoom 400%

but if i decrease it looks too small

mine is 1800px * 1600px

another question how many DPI should i put ?

Uh, the canvas size depends completely on what the image is to be used for. If you are doing a cover painting for a book the canvas is huge, but if you are making a sprite for a game the canvas is quite small.

If you just want freeform draw don't worry about the canvas size, put in something that fills the screen nicely. When you finish something on it you can always crop it.

DPI represents the ratio of pixels to nominal size in cm/inches. If you're not going to print your drawing it doesn't matter and you can always set it afterwards when you want to print. A good DPI for printing is 300 but if you are doing A4 paper size with 300DPI you're ending up with 2480 x 3508 which is a huge amount of pixels for any game content (other than concept art that are just images outside of the game).

What are you working on?

making characters and monsters for a game

Sprites should not be more than 1600x1600.

I kid because I love!

You should use as few pixels as you can get away with. I use a higher resolution(in powers of two) than I need in case for some reason I ever need to zoom in.

In my case, I target mobile devices so if my sprite will be 32 pixels high, I'll use a source file that is no bigger than 128x128. Image size effects performance on a phone where the memory is limited- both storage and system.

Mobile devices use small sprites, but PC game sprites can be quite big these days - 600 tall for a human character isn't that unusual, and a horse for that human to ride would be more like 800 tall, while a really epic boss monster might be 1000 tall. Basically you look at the screen resolution of the device the game will be played on, then you ask yourself how big the monster should be on the screen in the game. If the average PC screen resolution is now about 1000 px tall, and you want your character to be 1/4 as tall as the whole screen, then your character should be 1000/4 = 250. Though, many sprites include extra space above the character's head so that jumping animations, hats, or wings can be added without changing the sprite size. So if you want the character to look 250 tall, you might choose a sprite size 300 or 350 tall to give yourself lots of room. Sprites look jagged if you have to size them up, and get blurry if you have to size them down, so it's best to draw them the size they will be displayed.

hi

i use photoshop cs 5 for drawing but i think my canvas is too big to draw in and usually i use half of it so i zoom 400%

but if i decrease it looks too small

mine is 1800px * 1600px

another question how many DPI should i put ?

Hello Forenkazan,

First of all, that resolution is probably too big. Generally you also want to use textures with a pixel dimension that's a power of 2, so 32 x 32 pixels, 128 x 128, 512 x 512, and the lowest you feel like is still "good" (or whatever your requirement is, like a restriction on how much memory you can use). It sounds like if you're working at such a high resolution, you might want to look at vector art (Adobe illustrator or Inkscape) which will generally be easier to work with if you have a more cartoony style. Vector are is more appropriate to the resolutions sunandshadow is talking about (native screen resolution), but you can have a game at pretty much any resolution smaller than screen resolution.

If you're struggling with making things look right, you can draw big and then scale down, and the scaling will basically make a lot of the errors disappear. See this article for more on that: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/creative/visual-arts/better-programmer-art-r2594

DPI doesn't matter at all unless you plan on printing something out, otherwise the only thing you really need to keep track of is the pixel resolution.