4.1 Creating Layers and Layer Types

Hi, welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to create layers and I'm also going to explain the different kind of layers we can work with. To create a layer, you can just click on the New Layer icon here in new layers window. And that creates a new roster layer. So now that we have this new layer, we can draw In there and we have a roster image. If I delete that, you can also create a vector layer. So next to that, we have a new vector layer icon. You just click on that, and now any time you use one of these tools, it looks exactly the same, except if you go to your operation tool, you'll see this is actually a vector line that can be manipulated. We can also create groups for our layers by clicking on this folder here. So, we can drag any layer that we created into this folder. And then we can sort of collapse that and keep things nice and neat. As well as these two different types of layer, we have a couple of different modes to work with. So if I create a new layer, I can right click that and then we can go to layer settings. And you see that we can change a couple of settings here. So we can set our layer as a reference layer. Or we could click this small lighthouse here. So that would be the shortcut, clicking this icon here. So now this is a reference layer. It's a roster layer, and it's a reference layer. And you might remember in the previous lesson when I showed you how to use the pen tool for flatting. I'll draw in this reference layer. I'll just draw some outline shapes like this, and reference layers are used to create flats. So you'd put your line work as a reference layer, then you'd create another layer underneath. And choose a color. And now because we have do not exceed line of reference layer ticked on, because we've got a reference layer at the top here, we can really easily fill in all of these shapes, nice and neat. Like that. I'll just delete these now and I'll show you one more thing you can do with layers. If you go to layer settings, you can set as draft layer. So then you can go to your pencil tool, you can draw your rough sketch. And then when you create a new layer, a lot of the selection tools won't select draft layers. So if you're trying to manipulate your ink work that you do over the top. So you have some ink work, you go to the operation tool, and the operation tool may accidentally select a rough drawing underneath if it was selectable. But because we've set that as a draft layer, you'll see I can just move about this ink layer here, because draft layers aren't selectable. The bonus point of this is when you export your file, all of your draft layers, so you may want to hand over your file to a client. You don't have to sift through all of your sketch layers deleting them. As soon as you export, all of your draft layers will be automatically deleted. In the next lesson, I'm gonna show you how to change and further customize the layers you've created.