If you are an experienced diamond art painter you will know that sometimes bigger is better when choosing the canvas size of your next diamond painting kit.
One of the most common mistakes made when it comes to diamond painting is that crafters will choose a diamond painting canvas size that is too small for the design. Most of the time, a diamond painting hobbyist will choose smaller canvases because they are simply cheaper to buy and don’t take as long to complete.
But if you are going to choose a smaller canvas size, it is really important that you have realistic expectations on what the finished design will look like. The number one thing to be aware of when you choose a smaller design is that it will not be as detailed or realistic as a larger diamond painting canvas.
Whenever an image or design is turned into a diamond painting template, it is broken down into individual pixels or dots. Each of these dots is where you would place a single individual drill. Every ROUND diamond painting drill is 2.8mm in size and each SQUARE diamond painting drill is 2.5mm in size.
What this means is that the smaller the canvas, the more of the design a single drill will cover. On a large canvas, something such as an eye might take up several dots or pixels. The more pixels something takes up on the design, the more detailed that object will be.
However, if you are working on a smaller canvas, that eye might only take up a single dot or pixel. Only using one drill in one colour. You’ve suddenly lost a lot of detail in that eye, resulting in a much less detailed image.
As you can see, with a small canvas, suddenly you lose a lot of detail such as the whisps of the cat fur, the whiskers and the their eyes aren’t detailed at all.
Small canvases when finished will often look more “pixelated” which means that it will look more blocky and the individual drills will be much more obvious.
Something to also remember is that diamond paintings or pixel art is best viewed at a bit of a distance. This is so you get a better overall view of the picture and not focus on all the individual pixels or drills.
Most people will think a small canvas is a 20cm x 20cm or 30cm x 40cm design. When really, the design you choose will be the determining factor to what would be considered a “small canvas”.
If you are choosing a very simple design that has blocks of solid colour with very little detail, it could look amazing in a small 20cm x 20cm design. This is because it doesn’t need a lot of different colours and drills to define different areas of the design. On the flipside, if you choose a very detailed design or something with very fine design elements, 40cm x 50cm might be considered a small canvas.
This diamond painting’s canvas size is actually 40cm x 60cm yet you can see that it’s actually looking very pixelated and showing much detail. The design of this diamond painting is actually quite finely detailed so event when the canvas is not considered “small”, it still isn’t big enough to display the details clearly without being pixelated.
The bigger you go, the better the finished result will be. However, that doesn’t mean you should never choose a smaller design. There are plenty of reasons to choose a smaller design:
There are plenty of designs that will suit a smaller canvas. You just need to know how to choose the right image.
If you want a smaller canvas, look for diamond painting kits that are simple designs with a limited number of colours and are perhaps have blocks of colour with little detail.
This diamond painting design is only a 20cm x 20cm canvas size but because the image is quite chunky, even though it is a bit pixelated it still shows the design clearly and doesn’t look distorted. Small canvases can still be amazing if the appropriate design has been chosen.
At Blinging Craft, I try to avoid stocking any canvases that are too small for the design. However, that doesn’t mean that every design will be 100% detailed and clear.
There will be still some that still have lower details than you might be expecting and are more pixelated when finished. Even at 40cm x 50cm which is what most of the designs in store start at, sometimes these won’t show details such as feather lines or small flowers and butterflies because there aren’t enough pixels or drills covering that part of the design to show these fine details.
Now that you understand some of the finer techniques of choosing the right size canvas for your next diamond painting kit, why don’t you put your new skills to test by looking through the diamond art designs available in the Blinging Craft online store.
