Tutorial: How to Separate Layers for a Side-Profile Turn

Students ask about layer-separation techniques a lot (and honestly, we go over this in every single class!).

There's more than one way to do it, but I've got a project on hand right now that works great as an example, so let's walk through a simple approach for separating the body when turning to a side profile ↓

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Take this character as an example. For the part of the body below the chest, I wanted to be able to see as much of the side profile as possible when rotating on the X axis:

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But the body was originally drawn as a single flat layer like this — and just looking at that one layer, it's really hard to rotate it into a side view:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------So here's what I do: split it into three parts.

First, the blue clothing layer — I extend the painted area beyond the original outline to cover both sides:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Then I separate out the bare skin underneath on its own layer. This lets the blue clothing layer use the skin layer as a mask when rotating on the X axis, keeping everything constrained within that boundary:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Finally, I pull out the line art for both sides and stack it on the very top layer, so the lines don't disappear when the blue clothing shifts around inside the masked area:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------And here's the final result — that nice sense of dimensionality:

Pretty simple, right? (*^。^*)