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My old way of layering colors in Procreate vs my new method after watching a 2019 tutorial from a Russian artist named Igor
I used to just slap down base colors and blend with the smudge tool until it looked muddy. Now I separate every light and shadow into individual layers and use a clipping mask for each one, it gives way more control. The switch happened after I saw Igor's breakdown of a portrait where he used like 15 layers just for a face, and it clicked for me. Does anyone else find having more layers makes them slower or does it actually speed up your process?
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jessej231mo ago
More layers actually sped things up for me once I got the hang of it, because I stopped messing around trying to fix one layer that had everything on it. Having your shadow layer separate means you can just grab a big brush and block in the dark shapes without worrying about ruining your base color underneath, then you can tweak the opacity or change the fill color later without repainting anything. I noticed Igor's method really relies on using multiply or overlay blending modes for the shadow layers, that's the part that made it click for me, not just the number of layers but how they talk to each other. Once you start thinking of each layer as a piece of lighting information instead of a color, everything gets faster because you're making decisions instead of guessing. The slowness comes from when you have twenty layers but you're still treating them like they're all just different colors on the same flat surface, that's when it gets messy.
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west.casey1mo ago
Devil's advocate here, but total layer chaos is why I went back to flat painting. Every time I split shadows and lights into separate layers, I end up losing track of where my actual edge control is. That multiply layer trick sounds great until you're 40 minutes in and the shadow shape is wrong, but you can't just hit undo because you've already built the base color on top of it. Plus, all that layer management is like doing bookkeeping when I should be painting. I'd rather just lock the transparency of one layer and push dark values with a hard round brush, done in five minutes, no blend modes needed. Maybe it's a style thing, but I've seen plenty of pros do killer work on a single layer just by being careful with their brushwork.
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