Question

Do you create the MDPI drawable first and just scale it accordinly to the .075/1.00/1.50/2 ratio by pixels in photoshop or do you recreate each individual drawable?

Also is it better to start with a high quality image and start scaling it down or start with a MDPI image and just scale it up?

Here’s what i do:

Create a mdpi image in photoshop with 320×480 porportions and 160 as it’s resolution. Save 4 images and changing the resolution by simply entering 120,160, 240, or 320 as the resolution.

Answer 1

From the Android design guidelines:

Strategies

So where do you begin when designing for multiple screens?
One approach is to work in the base standard (medium size, MDPI) and
scale it up or down for the other buckets. Another approach is to
start with the device with the largest screen size, and then scale
down and figure out the UI compromises you’ll need to make on smaller
screens.

For more detailed information on this topic, check out Supporting Multiple Screens.