Shoutout to the random comment that made me rethink my layers setup

I spent like 3 years building digital paintings with way too many layers. Had this one piece with over 200 layers for a simple portrait. Then some guy on a stream said 'if you can't merge it you probably don't need it separate.' That hit me hard. Started merging non-essential layers and my workflow got way faster. Now I keep it under 30 layers max for most stuff. Anyone else have a dumb habit that took forever to break?

2 comments

2 Comments

sarahpatel1mo ago

Oh man, I had a friend who used to draw every single freckle on a character's face as its own layer. Like a hundred little circles for one face. She had this whole system for organizing them by color and shadow depth. It took her literally forever to finish anything because she kept having to scroll through this endless list of layers named "freckle 47" and "freckle 48." Then she watched someone do a speedpaint where they just used like three layers total and it blew her mind. She still complains about it but she's way faster now too.

olivia_carr71mo ago

Honestly tell her to try merging everything into one layer with a clipping mask, that's what saved me when I was doing the same thing with eyelashes. Way less scrolling and your brain stops getting distracted by 50 layers.