Working with layers

Manual painting is actually working on layers. Depending on the medium you use, you wait for the first layers to dry up in order to make the next coating not to interfere with proceeding steps of painting. Digital painting is quite different. It is like drawing on a plastic film. Nothing to worry for long wait for the coating to dry up, blottings and messy stains. If you mess with one layer, you simply delete or erase it.

One problem in digital painting is sometimes your PC cannot handle multiple layers. It requires lots of memory or RAM. I got only 32MB for my RAM and it can't handle more than four layers. My PC which is obsolete in today's standard runs too slow and most of the time crashes on the process of painting. I've solved this problem by working on at least three layers and then save in pxa format to work on it later. Another trick I use is copy and paste since layer is like a film of plastic. If you have 128MB or more on your RAM, everything would be easy. You can work with numbers of layers without slowing and crashing your PC.

In this tutorials I will show you how this landsace painting was made.

The first thing to do is to create a new canvass by clicking on which is located on the toolbar. A dialog box will pop up where you can make the canvass in any size you prefer. If you are going to post your artwork online, make sure the canvass must fit in the browser.

Instantly after clicking on OK, a layer will be created on the LAYER box.

Depending on the idea you want to paint, add layers as much as you want by clicking on "Edit," then choose "Add..."

Any layer that is highlighted in red means it is the current part you are working on.

The idea is to draw a landscape and I want also to include the sky on it. So, I highlighted the first layer and fill it with the color of the sky.

On the second layer, I made the sketch of my idea of a landscape scene: the sky, 3 mountains, water and a tree.

On the 3rd layer, I started to draw the clouds and, well, sometimes it also shows up in the noon, the moon. Then, the first montain.

If you want to see how the paintings go, you can hide a layer by moving it to the right. Hiding a layer is by clicking on the left and right arrow on the LAYER box. Try it repeated and see what happens.

If you have more RAM on your PC you can proceed on adding the 4th layer. Or let's say I got more RAM that can handle multiple layers. This is how it should go:

On the 4th layer, I draw the 2nd mountain. The 3rd one, on the 5th layer.

Since I wanted to include the body of water, I've made the reflections of sky and mountains on the 6th layer.

The coastline and everything on it like the beach and the bush and thickets of trees that surrounds the mountains were rendered on the next layers.

On the last layer, I made it look like I'm viewing the scene on the other side of the island overlooking by the tree.

Satisfied what goes in the layers, I deleted the sketch because I don't want it on the finished product. Then, merge all the layers.

Click here to see how the landscape looks like.

Another use of layer

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Making Computer Graphics

Working with layers

Masking techniques

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Merging images