#art terms

Canvas: A canvas is the file you open in your art program. Canvasses can be sized in inches, what I see most often is canvasses which are sized in pixel width. For example: The canvasses I work with to create my art are often 4000x6000px. Meaning: The canvas is 4000 pixels wide and 6000 pixels long.

DPI: I still don’t know what this means I just know that if you want to make poster sized images and print them it’s best to set this to 300 on a canvas. If you’re only going to post your work online in low resolutions you’re fine working with lower numbers.

Hues/saturation/values:

Hues are depicted in green, these are the colors you can pick on the wheel. Saturation is the intensity of that color and is depicted in the horizontal of the square. Values are the lights and darks and are depicted in the vertical of the square.

Cell shading:

Cell shading is the sort of shadows and light you see on anime for example:

You can see that the shadows on the face of this lovely man are drawn in in what we call ‘cells’ there is no gradual or soft change in values it has a hard boundary. There are many other forms of digital art that are not cell shading, for example: Digital painting, digital inking, digital cross hatching, digital soft shading, digital I have no idea what I’m doing but it looks good. Cell shading is the process I chose to depict due to my own experience with the style. Figure out what you like and what works best for you.

Composition:

The composition of a piece is how it’s organized: Do you put your focal point in the middle of the picture? Do you put it in a corner? Do you make your picture crowded with different lines or very bare with not a lot going on? For starting artists I suggest watching some videos on composition to learn more about how to divide and organize your artworks. Look at art, photography and cinematography to see that composition works for any form of art!!

Gesture vs form.

Gesture in art (mostly figures/bodies) is often used to describe a certain flow of a movement. You could literally see it as a hand wave being a gesture you can draw. Form is what we use to describe the roundness of an object or body part.

Rendering:

Rendering is the term used to describe the fine-tuning and finalizing of an image. When you’re at the rending stage you have all the basics set up and are working up to a finished piece. In 3D art rendering can refer to a thing a program does to make the final version for you but usually you’re the one doing all the work.

Commissions/Requests/Prompts: