Painting on separate layers

- So far, we have accepted the fact that everything we do on the digital canvas happens on a single surface. If we are applying color, we cover up what's below forever. Of course, we can use Selections to protect particular areas of our image, but if we apply color, everything beneath it is covered up.

Now, one of the most fascinating aspects of the digital canvas is that you can actually work on separate layers. Under Window, we can open the Layers palette. And here it is, and as you can see we have a single layer. Each file in Photoshop must have at least one layer, and it's normally called Background, and if we paint on our digital canvas all the color is applied to this background layer.

But we can now create a new layer. With a little icon below here, it looks like a little sheet of paper, we create a new layer which is called Layer 1, but we can actually give it our own name, or you might guess what I'm going to do next. I'm changing my color, and I'm going to start to paint, and I'm going to paint a couple of hills in front of our cloud here in the background.

And you can already see here in the thumbnail image of the layer that these hills are now sitting on their own layer and this little eye icon here gives us the opportunity to hide the layer, and we can see that the cloud in the background actually wasn't covered up. The color application, our hills, were created on a separate layer.

And let's just create another one. And now we have two layers of hills, and our background layer. Everything sits on its own layer. Nothing got destroyed, and that is a wonderful way to work.