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11) Drag your skin-colour layer below the Line Art layer.

12) Double-Click the little coloured icon for the Solid Colour layer. The colour mixer will pop back up and you can fiddle with the colour if you like. Hit OK when you’re happy.

13) Hit D to make sure your FG/BG colours are B/W respectively, Select the solid colour layer, and hit ALT-Backspace to fill the whole thing with black, getting rid of your scribbles. You can paint on the mask without actually being in mask-viewing mode. Thank goodness, too, because otherwise this technique would be thoroughly aggravating and possibly useless.

14) Whip out your brush, make White the FG colour, and start painting skin where skin should be. Don’t worry about staying in the lines if you think that that area will be obscured by the colour of an above layer. A little bleed helps ensure everything’s covered.

Basically, you repeat this process with new layers for each distinct colour that you want to use. Knowing how to divide and group areas of the image comes with practice, and you should be prepared to break up or merge layers as you continue working on the character. Don’t let the layer divisions start to designate your colour use – this is easy to do, lazy, and is not in the best interests of the image.

For example, in this image I originally thought that the lapel-type thing (which I called the “Top Tab”) underneath her neck-thing would be the same colour as the pocket-flaps on the front of her coat (or whatever that thing is). As such, they were on the same colour layer. As I worked, I wondered what it would look like if they were different colours, and so I had to divide those objects into two different layers. In the end, I decided they looked better the same colour, but I wouldn’t have been satisfied until I explored the option.

Fortunately, separating layers isn’t as hard as it might seem. Here’s what I did in the above example to put the Pocket Flaps on their own layer:

1) CTRL-click the icon of the mask for the “Top Tab and Pocket Flaps” layer, thus producing a selection in the shape of what you've painted.

2) Choose the Marquee (rectangular selection) tool (M).

3) Hold down ALT and drag a box around the selection of the Top Tab, subtracting it from the selection.

4) With just Pocket Flaps now selected, create a new Solid Colour layer. Since I had a selection going, it automatically created the mask in the shape of my selection (the Pocket Flaps).

5) In the old “Top Tab and Pocket Flaps” layer, fill the area of the pockets with black, just to make sure they didn’t interfere at some point down the road.

6) Rename the layers appropriately.

Keeping layers named clearly can seem like a waste of time, but it pays off. If you come back to the image in two or three months, you’ll appreciate the names. If someone else wants to play with the colours, they’ll appreciate the names. Sticking with our theme of Maximum Flexibility, it's good to clearly label every layer.

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