One Meter Tall Artwork

Generally, both when I work and when I draw, my program of choice is Adobe Illustrator. Using it, I create high quality vector artwork that can be made in any size you like, within reason.This artwork can be anything from new logos to business cards to labeling and patches, making brochures and putting magazines together, to designing flags, signage for shops and decals for cars. I do a LOT of different things.

Vector artwork is unique as it isn’t defined as a bunch of pixels, but instead is a bunch of points, lines and basic shapes, all combined together in a single file type. Probably the most commonly seen vectors are SVG (scalable vector graphic) files which are often used for logos and symbols across the internet. What Illustrator creates is essentially a SVG file. Well, it’s a proprietary .ai file, which is unique to Adobe Illustrator, but can be exported into EPS files and PDFs as well. All of which have the same stretch-ability vector rules.

When it comes to me, a lot of my work can be very small, size-wise. I’ve had clients ask me to move things by mere millimeters, only just noticeable to the human eye. Illustrator’s guides and rulers allow me to make things so insanely tiny. I can also specify exact sizes on all sorts, from basic shapes to logos and even text. Recent artwork I’ve done required me to have text that was only 5mm tall, half a centimeter.

Normally though, I rarely go out past A4 paper sizes. Much of my work at some point is shrunken down or expanded up to A4, so clients can preview their requests and sign off on finalized artwork. Funnily enough, some of my drawing is also oversized too. The last few drawings I did, when I imported them from Photoshop, they stood at about 1m in height. Which is pretty damn big for a picture of a small dragon or one of my characters.

But on the other end of the scale, I’ve also done some very large artwork.

Is there a maximum size? Well, there is in Illustrator. The largest you can do is about 5.7m by 5.7m. Anything larger than that tends to kinda get cut off. But at 5.7m squared, that’s a massive amount of work. But I have actually come close to those limits; I’ve done multiple 5m x 2-3m banners, as well as a sign that was 5m across. And I have been tempted to draw full 1:1 art of some of my characters. After all, a lot of humans are 2m tall. However, depending on the subject, a larger file is large in both size and file size. And that is when Illustrator gets angry with me and starts to slow down. So I have to be careful to not make anything too large.

At the end of the day, vector graphics can get absolutely huge. But normally I don’t need to make my artwork THAT big. At least the 5.7m squared area leaves me plenty of room to work.