It's only for organization. They are useful if you work with many layers and you don't want to name them =)

okay here's my layers on the last page:

[Background Group]

(this made me realize i posted my page without the bghaze layer turned on...oops...)


[Charas Group]

Flats and shit, p self explanatory. I do the clipping mask thing like Silver does.


Filled a hardlight layer with dark grey-purple, and paint from dark to light with light blues and reds [cos this scene calls for it lol], then additional highlights on an overlay layer [but not too many]... so nearly all my shading is on one layer with this colouring method.


[Edits Group]



[Other Shit]


If you open up the last 3 in new tabs and swap between them, it's prolly easier to see what these do:
1 (finished charas group) - 2 (merged/edits group) - 3 (overline/panel stuff)


I'm prolly gonna change it up again next chapter, since I started this Hardlight color method up just for the club scene xD;; It def made the colouring go faster for that, but idk how it will look on a normal lit scene. I might backtrack to gradients like I used on my Return of Dog (last page lol) side comic...

Oooo ... going to be using this. I spent most of the day learning how to do my usual stuff on MS ... getting on pretty well so far! Though I had a brief but heated argument with the rotate function. Also, is there a way of changing the shape of a selection once you've made it? GIMP had this thing where you could push the borders about in the rectangular selection function, which I tended to use a lot - but can't figure out how to do it on MS.

My layers colouring is really basic (tries not to look at heathers stuff ... ). This is as complicated as I've got so far (I always keep a backup layer of the linework beneath everything else, just in case I want to revert to it):



Here's the colouring without the light and line effects over the top:



I haven't done any colouring for ages, so I thought I split the shading and the flats - but it turns out I just used to do all the colouring on one layer. I'm thinking I'll put them on a different layer in future, just to make them easier to edit if needed.

Edit: Heather, what is the hardlight thing? I've not heard of it.

I have one deep important comment to make: the number of you guys with "eye glow" layers is great.

Dedicated glow layers just make me happy

My monotone What it Takes pages are really really simple. Just the same color on layers set at different opacity. But here's a recent color file I worked on.

I used to have any flats that touched each other on separate layers. Eventually I found a work-around and now all my flats are either on 1 or 2 layers total. The only time flats or shading are on separate layers is if it's a foreground/background thing, so I can tweak the final appearance of distance. Shadows are always clipped to my flats.

I like to shade in a deep red or blue, depending on the scene, with the layer on multiply around ~30%

okay, so that dedicated organized pallet of colors (I DID AN AMERICAN SCHOOLING COURSE OKAY?) is a great idea. I usually just pick my colors off of a previous page. Which is why, well... my colors sometimes get muddier, because i'm sometimes too lazy to load up a layered previous page and take off the shading.

>_____>

Here are my layers for my current page. They were not named, I only named them for you guys's convenience. I don't have a coloring 'standard' as it were, but at least for SGG, I usually flat, and then separate the background flats from the people... breaking the background flats up either sky/ground or walls/windows, anything that would help to section off, and then at least for outside I just lock the layer and draw straight onto it. For my people, I separate hair from clothing, because shading is a little different for hair... if it's a page with complex hair I might make a folder for that but this one was just a quick hand shaded gradient for Leawyn and I remembered after the fact that I forgot to do Maera's bangs purple and just slapped them in the same way as hers. I usually have several layers for different types of highlights, including at least one that goes over the lineart layer that's usually a texture set to 'soft light', and one that's clipped onto the flats, and often a texture-only overlay clipped to the flats as well. This page didn't get quite as overwhelmingly textury, so it's all reasonably non-complex, each layer serving a purpose that couldn't be done by merging without losing edibility, or different ones are set to multiply/regular/overlay/etc.



Also... dang. The colors for the posted page aren't that eye-searing, I have no idea why they're getting more saturated when I save as a jpg in Photoshop, versus the png I have on my site. o.o But you get the jist.

Alli, I've never heard of a woman being partly colorblind before! Only guys. Nice job coloring even with that going on, then.

I really admire all you folks who are organized about this whole layers business. While I tend to keep everything nice and labeled when I'm doing a painting in Photoshop, my comic layers are....

....well......



#NAILEDIT


I do very much like the paneling tool in MS, so I've been taking advantage of that. It does result in a ballooning number of overall layers, though, since every panel gets its own outline, skin tones, clothing, and a million background... things.

Like, that image doesn't look like it needs 44 layers.

It has 44 layers.

This looked fun to share so here are mine! (left at default size >.>)
Used chapter four's cover since this is when I started to become more organized......

Sketch

the sFACE or anything s(FILL IN) just means sketch of that thing...

Finished


Bee's colors: (grabbed from chapter 4, so this is why it's only Bee since I'm working out other characters)

If there is a middle color then it's just the base, so it's the first color placed... switch thing at the bottom means that eventually, at some point in the chapter, those colors will take each other's place in different parts.
Ex: the top might be black, but later on it will be blue instead.... Like on the cover.... XD

Layer-sharing, sounds cool actually haha

Here are mine for the (as of today) next page


Sketches are packed into a folder so I don't confuse them with visible layers. Also since I hop between SAI and PS a lot a few layer names seem to be the same.
Basic structure from the bottom is:
- Sketches
- BG flats
- BG shading/lighting (multiply and overlay)
- BG lineart
- character flats
- character shading/lighting (clipping masks applied to flats, working with multiply and overlay here, too)
- character lineart
- word balloons (which are turned off)
- website address
- bleeding lines (also turned off)

this is about average layer count for my comic pages. I like to keep things as simple as possible in my layers, avoids confusion for me haha

Man you guys, I don't even know what I would do with so many layers, haha! If I were doing fully rendered digitally drawn art I could see potentially using as many as... 7 layers. Maybe 8 if it needed extra effects.

I think when I first started my comic I used up to 3-5 layers only..... The background was one layer, the character coloring was also all together... which was baaaad xD and then the character lines... So normally 3 layers... but if feeling fancy there was an extra layer for shading and another for lighting! XD

I, too, started out with very few layers, but I also had lots more already, when I made all of them for each panel. It was a mess and confusing, so in that regard I got better again haha

Pfff I'm the opposite, I actually use far less now than I did at the start. Everything had its own layer before... I combine them a lot now.

The one thing I did add is two layers for character inks. 1 for the chara themself, and then a second layer to draw the hair... I tend to wanna fix the facial anatomy a lot while inking, so it saves having to clean up the hair lines if I wanna move the eyes around or something lol

Also for painting full pieces, like these two, it's usually like two or three layers and I just paint over the sketch. (Tho the sbn one I think I inked it normal first before deciding to paint it lol)

Like hchano, I now use far fewer layers than I used to. Some of my TWoW comic pages were >100 layers. THEN I DISCOVERED CLIPPING MASKS. And then I started merging layers.

I never merge shadows with highlights, or background and foreground, in case I want to tweak later.

I think I use the most layers on chapter covers since I try to be more cautious about them, and actually separate a lot of the line work, like the face, hair, clothes = all on different layers.

I might start making the face and hair on separate layers for my pages because it's been useful for the covers, and in general it's pretty damn useful... especially since I always run into the problem of Bee's head being too big for her body.... re-sizing will just be much easier with everything on a separate layer xD so then it's not awkward and doesn't look out of place, all that jazz.

I never tried clipping masks tbh, I heard it's really useful but I never gave it a shot XD
The only layers I ever merge (if needed) would be certain line work layers or layers of colors that never meet.

The only way of organization in my process is really the whole group separation... Because I tend to forget to name my layers a lot of the time. ~_~