A customer told me that she always works in 600 dpi and wanted to put her artwork into an Art Surface and make sure it remained at 600 dpi so I made this video for her, showing two different ways to do it. There’s a text summary below the video
Method 1
Change the dpi to 600 dpi with resampling off (unchecked) Then paste your 600 dpi image into it (into the green ‘Artwork’ layer)
Then you can use the crop tool to increase your canvas size to any size you need and the background will magically fill in the paper texture seamlessly.
This will tile the Art Surface and the surface grain will appear smaller than when at 300dpi
Method 2
to keep the surface grain appearance the same as it looks when at 300dpI, resize the image to scale it larger (I wouldn’t go more than 200 percent) with resampling ‘on’ When you have it the size you like, change the dpi to 600 with resampling off (unchecked)
Yes, its true, your paper texture will effectively be at 300 dpi but I don’t think this will be a problem in most cases because:
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- The textures on the surfaces are mostly failrly crisp, so they can handle quite a bit of scaling
- They are meant to be used as background surfaces, so most of the time it will be mostly covered or at least not the center of attention
- Your Artwork, which will be the center of attention and focal point will be at 600 dpi
If you do find that he surface texture is too soft you can just use method #1 and your texture will remain twice as sharp
The Art surfaces can be found here
Oh, though one problem that I’ve found with the art surfaces is with the mixer brushes included in the 350 brush set don’t work properly with them. If you try mixing in the “Artwork” folder on any layer, including the green “Artwork Goes Here” with the brushes from that set they sort of act like erasers, simply removing linework and even the background color of the textured surface itself. I’ve tested the mixer brushes on plain canvases and they seem to work fine, but when used with the Art Surfaces they are faulty. I REALLY want to be able to use them with the surfaces, for obvious reasons. Any advice here would be very much appreciated!
Good question! The problem is in the way Photoshop calculates what to blend when ‘mixing’ It is trying to blend the lighting effects layers and it’s not able to compute them properly. There are a few ways to deal with that, but rather than try to explain it I made you a video: Play the video here
Hi Nicolai. I just bought the Art Surfaces Pack #1 (along with the 350 brush set) and am in love with it so far. I’m considering buying the second pack, but I can’t tell from the pictures on your website if there’s really much of a difference between the two packs, or enough to warrant the purchase. Thoughts?
Jason Barron
Thanks Jason! I’m so glad you like them. It’s almost impossible to answer that question though as the answer really depends on you. Just like in real life, if you buy one pad of watercolour papers would you really want to buy a different type of paper next time? Some people might stick with the same kind forever, while others would pick a different grade of paper for each new piece. It’s definitely more of the same, but also definitely different 🙂