What if You DIDN'T Name Your Layers?

It’s time to start your next art piece! You grab your tablet, open up your art app, and there it is… Layer 1. You lay some scribbles down. A sketch comes together. But now it’s time for a new layer. What do you call it? Suddenly… you’re stuck.

A big roadblock for beginners to digital art is figuring out what to label layers. It’s just not something you do traditionally! Do you name them the objects that are being drawn? What do you call the lines versus the shading? What if you have multiple shading layers? What the heck do I name all of these background layers?

I’ve got a secret for ya on how you name your layers… just don’t.

Don’t name them. At all. I know it looks awful in that layer list, just seeing all of those layer numbers and untitled names. I know. It bothered the heck out of me for a while to not name them, but I’ve made myself ignore it enough that I’m able to get it out of the way and focus on my art instead. It kind of goes hand in hand with the mess of art itself: you might be making some bad art, you might have some happy accidents, there might be a general sense of chaos on the canvas, and your layer names are all over the place. Let it be a part of the chaos!

And guess hecking WHAT? No one is going to see the layers when you export. They aren’t there! But maybe you’re streaming art as you make it? GOOD. SHOW people your messy unnamed layers. FLEX your insanity. SPREAD the sickness and tear down the institu–

It might seem like such a silly small thing, but training yourself to ignore the parts that don’t actually matter in your art removes yet another little roadblock to getting started. Combined with everything else about drawing, it can all add up! When you get an idea for a drawing, you want to be going from that idea in your head to drawing as fast as possible. On paper, that’s usually pretty easy. Digitally, you have to open up some art apps, sometimes connect a tablet, and sometimes a bunch more. Some of that you can’t change, but some, like organizing your layers, you can!

Some art apps have even stopped showing layer names! They just show the thumbnail and make it easy and fast to switch around. Sooo… how do you identify your layers like that? It’s less troublesome than you’d think. Beyond the thumbnails of the layers themselves, you’ll start to notice that you’ll organize your layers a similar way every time. For me I typically have line layers on top, fills in the middle, and of course background in the back. Then I also recognize that I use clip masks (which look different in the layer list) for coloring. And for shading especially, I’ll usually have a layer or two in a different blending mode and can spot that pretty quickly. Don’t use blending modes or not sure what those are? If that’s the case, don’t worry! You probably will have an even simpler looking layer list because blending modes are one of the reasons for having lots of layers in the first place.

What I’m getting at is that you’ll more often switch layers by “feel” than by reading their names. Sometimes it’s useful to label groups of say, different characters, if you have a lot going on. But that doesn’t mean you have to start labeling everything. My general rule is that I’ll name a layer once I have trouble finding it. Maybe stick an emoji on it to make it stand out. But I never spend the time up front anymore doing that, because I can never really plan out exactly how my drawing is going to work.

Maybe this doesn’t work for you! Maybe you need the names after all! That’s fine. But if you’ve just been naming them because you’ve thought you were supposed to, try breaking the mold and see if you like it. But Kanjon, you say, What about traditional? Haaaah. If you’ve figure out how to do layers easily on a physical medium, let me know how. But hey, screen or paper, go draw something today. See ya next time!