Quote Originally Posted by delgondahntelius View Post

I've never thought of keeping layers for color, like probably most people.. I do keep them by type... forests.. mountains... hills... etc..
What I've found is that you can cut and paste object inks, like furniture, and if you keep the colors on a separate layer beneath your inks you can modify them on the fly without affecting the ink layer. This makes modifying your colors and shading much easier.

For example. Use a hard edge brush to draw the inks of a bed, making sure that the bed outline has no breaks, then use the magic wand to select the area outside of the bed. Invert your selection and contract it by 1 pixel. You should have a selected area that traces the shape of the bed but is just a smidge smaller. You can then fill this area on a separate color layer below your ink layer. Lock the transparency on your color layer and you can modify it with brushes and not worry about staying within the lines. You can also create alpha channels from the shape to mask off additional layers for shading or highlights. The idea is that you should be able to modify the colors without damaging the inks.