in a word wow, (i say wow because I have tried blender) i am looking for your graineness, but this image is smooth. my best guess tells you to lower the specular value on the 'drawing' material, it is reflecting a lot of light. change the bumps on your pencil mats make the pencil body a little more smooth and shiny, make the sharpened wood a little bumpy, zoom in a little tighter on the spider object, and render to your target size...some photo apps will wreck a render... i.e. I like to render to my screen res of 1280x960 but hosting sometimes drags down to 800x600. when rendering for that host, i will render to 800x600 instead of my personal preferred size. yet opposite, you can render to a large .jpg and open the image in an editor, and save at a reduced quality and take a large.jpg to a smaller file size...

Hi SESpider one suggestion is try this in layers in Photoshop.By doing this you have the control I think your looking for in your image.I like it now don't get me wrong but I would give the layer thing a try.

Thanks guys. The pencil did have all of the effects you suggested. But because it's one mesh, I know the problem with it. The Grain is coming directly frfom Blender. Somewhere in the render process is messing up but only in the main part of the image (the right side of the image). I've still not learned how to render the images larger. It'll be really nice to know how to do it. Oh, SGT2005, Not sure what you mean. The ONLY photoshop work in this image is my Sig on the bottom left. I'll be using posting other renders of this little guy. Including a recreation of my original colored drawing and a angle that gives a view of his bocy (under the skull).

To change the size of your image go to the render buttons (Scene, F10). On the right side, under "Format," there are places where you can change the size of the image (see the spaces for sizeX and sizeY?) and you can switch it from a jpg to a bmp if you want to (or whatever you like best - there are several choices) using the drop-down menu below that. I would love to answer your question about the grainy thing, but I appear to be brain dead right now (it's pretty late here). It has something to do with lighting and ray tracing and ambient occlusion, but I can't, for the life of me, figure out what to tell you about it! I just learned about it myself, and it's not second nature yet. This is way cool! You're doin' great!

good luck with flame and smoke... i have a tutorial up on water though... nice job with the AO! i realy like this image. the scull has the perfect texture, the eye could use a little work, but the paper is perfect. to change the grainyness you bring up the samples of ao to 14-16, although it makes the render much slower. you could try something in yafray, but that requires lots of time spent on technical consideration of settings.

Again, Richard...I'm so very proud of you! You unceasingly amaze me with your work!!! You are so very clever with your artistic ideas!! You have been seriously blessed with a God given talent!!! Keep up the good work!!!

Excellent work. You are really coming along. As far as fire, volumetrics, and what not, check out blendernation.com. There should be something there to help out.

Great critter :) I can't see it very well on this screen, but have you tried increasing the sample number (or whatever it is) for the Ambient Occlusion?

It looks really superb!!! Great artwork!