How to fill layers quickly in Procreate - Procreate Tips

Hello everyone and welcome back to Ghost Paper. My name is Leo and for today's video we're going to learn the powerful tool that is the reference layer. The reference layer in Procreate is a really powerful tool when you want to add color to some of your outline artworks. So this in fact works really well with manga illustrations and that's why I have one example here right here so we can understand how this tool works. But it works with any kind of illustration you may have that you want to add color and that illustration is based on outlines. So if you have something that looks like this that is black and white and you want to add color this is one of the best methods you can do to achieve this quickly. So the way that I can show you without that being a reference layer so say you have you were given this piece of artwork you were asked to maybe add some color onto it or maybe this is your own piece of artwork and you want to add color and you in fact have all the outlines in one layer. One way that you can go about it is you just create a new layer and put it here at the bottom pick a color and then pick a brush right here and you could just start painting and this would be an extreme amount of work to just go and start painting all of this hair just imagine going around even if you were to just paint the outline stroke of this hair to then be able to fill shapes something uh I'll just do a very rudimentary here something like this that you could just drop a color and keep painting this would still take quite a bit of time to actually get this whole picture with color. So one way that we can just do that I'll just delete this layer here the way the reference layer works is that we click on our outline layer and then see here the last option says reference we click on this one and now any layers there are above or below this reference layer I'm just going to leave it at the top since this is our outline layer we want it to be at the top of everything now all that I need to do is to use the color uh draw uh drag and then drag it into the area that I want to to paint so let's pick another color here and I'm just going to drag right away and drag it over here into all of the skin into all of the skin areas and then if I want to choose another color I'll go right here this could also be the eyes and so on and so forth I can go back to the hair and I can paint it here and uh see how quickly this is it's kind of mind-blowing how quick the reference layer can help us and procreate but I also want to do something else that I want to show you so this layer the outline layer is still marked as reference I'm going to create another layer here put it underneath and I'm going to drag and drop and this is the hair and just you know again see how I'm not even I don't have to do anything to the reference layer the reference layer is really just working for us and telling procreate where are the areas where we can fill with color so now that I've created the hair layer I'm going to create another one and I'm going to change the color and green will be the shirt and then I'm going to create another layer put the skin layer onto skin color onto this layer and I'm going to do this so now what we have that's also really powerful is that if I turn off the outline layer now I have different layers as my masks so now if I click on a sail on the skin layer and I want to go as select turn back our outline layer and create another one I can now go and let's just say I want to paint some start painting some shadows and I can start doing that without inflicting on any other areas because I now have separate let's just call it masks so I'll just multiply for this guy so all of a sudden the reference layer helped us to to get masks for each piece of our illustration and to be able to paint them without affecting other areas so this becomes a really like a really really powerful tool in order to be able to quickly fill in shapes that you don't really have access because all of your outlines say are in one layer and the last thing that I do want to show you just turn off everything again is that if I create a new layer and this is still set to reference but if I use the brush the brush doesn't respect the reference layer because the brush the Procreate can't really tell if you're trying to paint a specific area or not with the brush it only works with the color drag if you do use this color drag feature that's where it works with a reference layer that's just one thing to know bear in mind this information so that's pretty much it for this video I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you had some good educational level for you to learn a little bit more about how to work with reference layer if you did enjoy this video please leave a like please comment what's your best tool that's my question for you at the end of this video what is the best tool that you find in Procreate let me know in the comment section down below I can also make a video about that or research a little bit more but I will certainly keep making videos about these quick Procreate tips as I do find they really help us in our workflow in our daily workflow so thanks for watching this video and I'll see you guys on the next one