Why 300dpi with a mouse is a bad plan art View Project
May 14, 2014
So my friend Kat on my roleplay forum made this awesome line art for one of my characters. I've drawn her before; she's a kitsune who can transform into a fox, a werefox, and a human. 
This is already awesome, and I decided, because I'm not always the brightest, to color it with a mouse at 300dpi.
This was a bad plan.
Now, most digital artists are experienced enough to realize that 300dpi is a good resolution to work in. If you don't want to put much detail in, then you don't have to if you're going to be shrinking it down anyway. However, most artists aren't me, and most of them don't use a mouse to do things. They all have tablets.
I'm a very detail-oriented artist. If you've looked at anything I've drawn that has fur on it, you'll notice that I have a tendency to draw as many of the actual fibers as possible. This is one of the reasons why until this point, I've been avoiding working with any resolution higher than 72dpi, the default in Photoshop. I drive anyone in the room completely nuts by the sheer number of clicks I make while drawing with my mouse.
So I got this far before basically giving up, which was in late December when I received a tablet for Christmas:
This is so outrageous I'm actually a little angry at myself, because the results are full of flaws despite the stupid amount of time spent on detail.
I tried. Oh how I tried. And it's not that the results aren't perfect and I'm a perfectionist; that's only slightly the problem. The real problem is that I started coloring this thing, not joking, almost a year ago.
And I really haven't gotten much further than these images show, because I gave up.
Thankfully, I now have a tablet and can just go back and try to fix the mistakes as well as, I don't know, finish.
I'll be posting more process photos if I do end up summoning the energy to go back and finish this project. I'd really like to because it's a great line art and I need the practice with clothing. Textiles are my bane, really. Also the amount of laces. Kat has a lace fetish.