I've just started to delve into digital drawing and I don't have a problem looking at the screen and drawing on my tablet. I think it is because when I'm airbrusing I'm also looking at the surface I'm painting onto and not the airbrush.
@crewchief227 have you looked at Manga Studio 5 also known as Clip Studio Paint which is the downloadable version
http://www.clipstudio.net/en It's designed for comic drawing and even though I don't draw comics I find the vector line tool so natural to use and makes line adjustment really easy. I like it's smooth line tool too and all in all I think it's great drawing software at a brilliant price, for around $50 US it's nothing. It will also import and export photoshop format files. If I hadn't bought a stupid digital Airbrush Tool which it doesn't support I'd be using it far more. Infact I might give up on the Airbrush Tool as a mistake purchase and get stuck in!! I've just convinced myself
The Airbrush Tool doesn't work like an Airbrush anyway.
@Immortal Concepts You say you work at 4000 x 4000 at a low resolution, how low? And then you bump up the resolution for the finished picture can you explain that more? Pretty please
What size canvas do you end up with in cm? At the moment I tend to create an A4 canvas at 300 resolution because that's what I'm going to print out.
4000 pixels is equal to like 53.33 in, or 135.45 cm. Now here is where it gets tricky and confusing
. The printed or display size changes according to the resolution you set. The higher the dpi the smaller the printed image will be. Pixels don't have a set size to them and is just the amount of information contained in the image. Most monitors only display at 75dpi (mine displays like 96dpi) and 300dpi is photo like print. This is why often when you print out a picture that looks big on your screen for a reference, prints out really small or really big and you get frusterated because it won't print at what you assume is a large photo on the web, when in reality it has a high or low dpi set to it (computers rescale images to be viewed best to your screen size and resolution)
Going back to 4000 pixels, it won't always be 135 cm as I just said, and this is because of the dpi. I'll have to stay with inches from here on out because trying to convert to cm is confusing the hell outta me
. To scale the sheer size down to better understanding, I'll stick with 5400 x 3600px canvas size. If you set the dpi to 300, it would print out to about 18 x 12 inch paper. Now if you set it to 200dpi, the pixels don't change, but the paper print size would change to 27 x 18 inches. Now you can print it however small or big you want, but this is native resolution print size, and obviously the larger you try to print it, the more pixelated it will look because the pixel size increases.
I work in 150dpi because it is the standard max that most home printers or print stores can do. If the final image needs to be photo like quality or a giclee, I will bump it up to 300dpi. There are some really high end printers that will do 600dpi and up and becomes extremely expensive to have printed.This is why when you find people who sell prints, have different prices for the same image. The more it costs, the higher the dpi was set, and since the higher the dpi is set, the smaller the image would print so then it has to be modified to scale to the same size for every different setting. Mind blown yet?
To further simplify, it doesn't matter if you work in 100 dpi or 4 million dpi, the pixels of the canvas don't change so there is no point to be working in a high dpi the whole time. It's purely for physical print information. Since monitors are typically 75dpi you cannot see a difference, only in the physical print would you see it and are limited to what your printer or print shop can output.
Now to confuse you more hehe. Programs like PS match your image to your monitor's resolution at 100% size to provide the sharpest view on the screen. So at 100% zoom you are viewing the image 3 to 4 times actual size. This is why when you scale the canvas while working on it, say 25%, 50% etc it views fine, but if you try an odd percentage like 36%, 76% etc etc it looks pixelated *its actually called scaling artifacts* These ragged edges look awful, but the do not affect the actual image file and you cannot see them in the printed image.
I can go on and on and get more confusing
but I'll say a quick thing about illustrator and vectors. These are not pixels, but mathematical curves.This is why they are virtually infinitely scaleable and stay sharp at all sizes. However,
, if you output it to print, vectors are still converted to the restrictions of the printer the same as pixel based images are and will pixelate if printed too big. This is why vinyl wraps look good at a distance, but pixelated up close. Now they can be printed to massive scale and stay sharp as you can see out in the world in huge ads on buildings and super high quality wraps, and they accomplish this by offset printing. This is a completely different subject but basically the images are converted electronically into equidistant dots of different sizes to create halftones instead of same size dots. This is why a wrap can cost a couple hundred bucks, or thousands for the same thing.
