How to Use Clipping Mask Quickly in Procreate - Procreate Tips

Hello everyone, welcome back to another mini tutorial session. Today we're going to take a look at the clipping masks option in the layers panel. So what are clipping masks and how can it help us whenever we're creating illustrations here in Procreate? Well the best way I can show you an example of what clipping masks can do for us is whenever we have an illustration such as an element, it could be the circle right here, and you want to paint some light and shadows. So one way to actually achieve this is to create a new layer, click our base layer and hit the select option in order to create a mask and then go into our new layer, select our brush, in this case a noise brush with a bigger size and full on opacity and we could then start painting the shadows onto the circle in order to create the appearance of a sphere. However, there is a better way and that way is the clipping mask. So let's delete this layer, create a new one and now we're going to click on this layer and select the option clipping mask. You will see it creates a little arrow pointing down to our base layer which is then telling, it's basically telling Procreate, it's telling layer two here to actually look at the pixels created on layer one or base layer and automatically creating a mask for it. So what that means is that now I can start painting without having to click on any other option such as select, I don't have to worry about anything else and I'm already painting the shadows onto the circle respecting the boundaries of the circle. So now I could create a new layer, for example, again I do have to click on the layer and select the option clipping mask and then on my layers on my color palette, I can select another color because now we're going to do something like the highlights and now we can paint the highlights to the sphere. So it's a really, really quick process that we can go about into creating lighting shadows onto something like the base that we want to paint on. And as you can see here, this new layer, layer three, also has the arrow pointing down which means it's doing a chain reaction of layer three, it's then going into layer two and layer two is using layer one as our base mask. So it gets really interesting because I can go back here on layer two and now if I just hold the erase to actually copy the settings from our paint tool, I can now erase our shadows, try to kind of like smooth out this effect and as you can see, it's really still respecting the boundaries of our base layer. And what's also really interesting is that because I've painted my shadow and my highlight layer as two separate layers, it still allows you to actually control the blend modes such as multiply or even overlay for my dark layer and the same would go for our light layer. So we could actually go into the lighten category and hit add and take down the opacity and so on and so forth. So you can really play with the fact that you're also creating new layers which are able to take blend modes. And lastly, just one thing to note is that if I click here on my layer one and I can just select any color and I'm going to go back into our studio pan just to really show what it can do. If I go into my base layer and I start to paint areas that are outside our circle, I do need to go back here, I just want to hit normal so you can see, it's revealing what we have painted on layer two without really having to worry that that was stepping out of the boundaries of our base layer. So as you can see here, we do have the the brush with our noise brush is actually hitting way outside the yellow circle because now I'm painting that base layer which means I'm expanding the mask from our base layer. And there is also a better way to do that in the case meaning that if you want to do any changes to this base layer, you can actually do in the following way. I'm just going to roll back into multiply so you can really see these shadows right here. So say we're here in this base layer and we want to do changes to this shape but we don't really want to affect the original artwork. You can now click on layer one and you can select mask and now we have a layer mask for base layer which means that if you play with pure white to add things to this mask or if you go into your colors and go into full black, full black is going to remove things from our base layer as a mask. So we're not going to be deleting layer one but if I start painting here you see that I'm starting to occlude things from layer one. So it's a really interesting thing because in fact layer mask, the fact that we are taking out parts from our base layer is also taking out parts from our two clipping mask layers on top. So basically the clipping mask layers are understanding that there is a layer mask and making an addition or subtraction to our base layer. So I hope this all makes sense and in a way I'm just showing you how powerful it can be if you start playing with clipping masks and layer masks in order to hide or show things into your base layer and combine those with clipping masks in order to paint, paint light or and shadows. So I hope this video was really informative for you. I hope you had some great educational value in order to show a little bit more of what clipping masks can do for you in Procreate and if you did enjoy this video please leave a like, subscribe to the channel and I'll see you guys on the next one. Ciao!