Determining how big to draw sprites

[EscapeReality]

My sister's my artist for a visual novel we're making. She says that she plans on hand-drawing the sprites. How big should they be - given in real dimensions - if they are to fill up the screen to about the same amount of space as the screenshot below:
(image is from Rewrite, a visual novel by Key)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... enshot.jpg

Thanks

[Fungii]

Typically, when you scan something in, it'll be 300dpi, or at least you can tell it to do that. When you do this the resolution is huuuuge so I doubt it'd really be an issue.

Going by eyesize, though, I'd say about...A5 size? (Half a sheet of paper, like the size of a birthday card)

[Unin]

Open image in photoshop or other image editor
Image->image size.
Change from pixels to inches
In the case of your image, it's 7 inches by 4.33 inches

Note the image summary on it's wiki page though:

"The copy is of sufficient resolution for commentary and identification but lower resolution than the original artwork. Copies made from it will be of inferior quality, unsuitable as artwork on pirate versions or other uses that would compete with the commercial purpose of the original artwork."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rewri ... enshot.jpg

In other words, whoever took that screen shot resized it down to save space when uploading


That said, it's entirely dependent on pixels per inch, the above is for 72dpi (dots per inch), but if you have a good scanner, you may want to go for 300dpi.

really, when it comes to art, it's best to draw big, and then scale down. that can take a lot of time though.

my recommendation would be to pencil it, scan it, and then ink/paint it in photoshop or some other image manipulation program. this way you get clean transparencies without being at the mercy of a lasso or magic-wand tool, so your sprites don't have any fuzzy halos around them on high-contrast backgrounds.

[EscapeReality]

Thanks to you both. I'll try A5 size (8.3 x 5.8 in), since it is the larger one suggested, given that the Rewrite image had been scaled down.