Found a layer order trick that fixed my shading problems in like 10 minutes

I was working on this portrait in Procreate and the shadows kept looking like muddy garbage no matter what I did. Tried blending modes, opacity changes, nothing worked. Then I remembered a tutorial from like 2 years ago that said to put your shadow layer ABOVE your color layer but set to multiply and cut its opacity to 60%. Did that and it instantly looked right, like night and day. Has anyone else had a random old tip suddenly click and fix a project that was driving them crazy?

2 comments

2 Comments

smith.jordan1mo ago

Spent like THREE hours yesterday fighting with shadows on a landscape painting before remembered the exact same thing. Felt like a complete idiot when it worked in about 30 seconds. Honestly feels like digital art is just a collection of random arbitrary rules that you have to rediscover every few months.

the_max1mo ago

lmao yeah that's the digital art way, you spend hours fighting with something then realize it was one dumb checkbox you turned off by accident three layers ago. i've sat there for a solid 45 minutes trying to figure out why my brush wasn't working only to find out i had opacity set to 2%. feels like my brain just takes a vacation every time i open the program lol. honestly it's like learning the same lesson over and over but in different fonts. i keep a little notes file on my desktop called "stuff i keep forgetting" and it's basically just me writing down the same four tricks every six months because i refuse to remember them permanently. at least we're all in the same boat of making ourselves look like geniuses on accident half the time.