Retaining clarity through structure

Since paintings are complex beasts, it's always a good idea to re-simplify and break down our paintings at various points of their creation. Maintaining our sense of clarity, or visual coherence, is key.

So, why did we make the new foreground, midground, and background plane selections? Why make these new alpha-locked layers that essentially already existed in a previous part of our painting exercise? Let's reveal the true power of this technique:

1. In your Layers panel, select your Midground (Mountains) layer to make it the active layer.
2. Ctrl-click on the layer's thumbnail (on the left-hand side of the layer's row, next to the hide/reveal eyeball icon) (Figure 8.13):

Figure 8.13 – A close-up of the Midground (Mountains) thumbnail for Ctrl-click selections

Bam! This immediately selected only the contents of the selected layer! Try holding Ctrl and clicking on another layer&apos...