Why does nobody talk about checking your canvas resolution before you start adding details?

I spent like 4 hours on a character portrait last week, got all the shading and highlights perfect, then realized I had the canvas set to 72 DPI instead of 300. Looked fine on my monitor but when I tried to print it for a friend's birthday gift, it came out all pixelated at 5x7 inches. I found that fact buried in a thread on some art forum from like 2018. Has anyone else accidentally worked too long at low res and had to redo everything?

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paigeg221mo ago

Oh man that hurts. I've literally done the same thing but with a 300 DPI canvas that was only 500x500 pixels thinking it was fine because the resolution number was high. Spent two days on a detailed dragon eye then went to scale it up for a print and it looked like a blurry mess. Do you usually work in inches or pixels as your main unit when starting something? I switched to inches after that disaster cause it forces me to check the physical size before anything else.