| You should get into the habit of scanning and creating all of your digital artwork at a high resolution. I recommend working at somewhere between 300 and 600 dpi. Keeping your artwork on hand at a high resolution is a good idea if you ever need to print your artwork or need to prove that you are the original owner in cases of plagiarism. It also allows you to be more flexible with how you use your artwork. When it comes to digital images, keep in mind that you can always scale down an image to a smaller size. However, you can not scale up an image, as in taking a smaller file and making it bigger. That would result in severe pixelation and quality degradation. Whenever displaying your artwork on the web and submitting it to PaperDemon, you'll need to size it down to a web friendly size. You can do this easily in GIMP by following these steps. Start by opening your file. You can do this by going to File > Open and using the explorer window to navigate to your artwork image. In the window with your artwork, go to Image > Scale Image. The Scale Image dialog box will appear. Change the units to pixels if it isn't that already. Be sure the width and height are linked so that your image scales in proportion. You can toggle this by clicking the link icon. Usually when I resize the image I set the highest value to somewhere around 600 pixels. So if you have a horizontal image, set the width to 600 pixels. If it is a portrait oriented image, set the height to 600. Anything below 700 pixels should be ideal for displaying artwork on the web.  Once you have the settings how you'd like, click the Scale button in the Scale Image dialog box. Now just save a copy of your artwork. You don't want to overwrite your high resolution image. To save a copy, just go to File > Save a copy in the window with your artwork. Type a file name and confirm the image settings. Now you are all set! |
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