Hello everyone!
I’m Inma R., professional illustrator and webcomic artist.
I have a lot of work that needs to be done in record time, so over the years I’ve been editing my workspace to find everything as quick as possible so I can work faster.
I’m going to show you my workspace and give you some tips to enhance yours.
How to arrange your workspace
There are different ways to place your palettes on your workspace. First you have to make each palette visible by clicking on it on the Window menu.
Then all you have to do is to drag each palette to your desired location, where you will see a red line that marks where that palette is going to land.
If you drag it to the side of another palette (or to the edge of the software), you’ll move that palette to that side.
Let’s see an example with the Color Slider. When I drag it here:
It becomes like this:
When I drag it on top or under another palette:
It’s placed between those palettes:
And when I drag it next to the name of another palette:
It creates a little folder so you can switch between those two palettes without having them both active at the same time.
Now that you know how to move your palettes around, I’m going to show you my workspace and the things I do to work faster with it.
General view of my workspace
What’s on my workspace and why is it there?
1) Color set: some color set I downloaded for forests, to which I started adding colors I use a lot to access them quickly when working.
2) Layer property: I keep it right above my layer list so I can apply effects like border easily.
3) Layer: your layer palette must always be accessible, it’s what you’ll use the most!
4) Color wheel: to choose colors fast.
5) Tool: I like to have my tools in horizontal rather than vertical because it’s easier for me to find them and I like having them in three different lines.
6) Tool property: here you can edit size, antialiasing, opacity, etc.
7) Auto Actions: I downloaded and created many auto actions over the years. Since there are many I use on a daily basis (changing lineart color, creating layers for shading, turning layers to vector, etc.), I made a special set called “FAVOURITE ACTIONS” where I put them all for quick access.
8) Command bar: you can put here the things that you use the most, like flip canvas, resize, quick mask, etc., so you can access those functions quickly.
9) I have my canvas in the middle of the screen.
10) Color History: sometimes I want to use the same color I used before, but it’s not saved anywhere! This is an easy way to retrieve that color without having to use the dropper.
11) Quick Access: THIS IS LIFE SAVING. I’ll make a section just for this later. To sumarize: it’s where you put everything you use a lot so you can access it quickly (hence the name).
12) Sub tool: to access all the little tool folders inside your main tool folders.
13) Sub View: I use this window for character design and quickly selecting that character’s colors.
14) Material: I keep my material folders closed and open them when I need to access 3 figures, templates, backgrounds, etc.
Arranging decoration brushes
By default, the software has each type of decoration into different folders in the Sub Tool palette, but all of them are accessible through the same main tool of decoration.
After years of downloading hundreds and thousands of brushes, I had to start making new Sub Tool folders to keep everything in order, and I ended up with LOTS of Sub Tool folders, which were a pain to navigate.
Wait a minute, how do you create new Sub Tool folders?
Creating new Sub Tool folders/categories
Just drag any brush to where the Sub Tool folders are and a new folder will be created with that brush’ name.
The red line marks where the new folder will be created. After that just right click on that folder, select “Sub tool group setting” and change the name of that folder to whatever you want.
If rather than dragging a tool next to another folder you drag it INTO another folder, you’ll just be moving that tool into that folder. Easy!
Rearranging the decoration tools and sub tools
I had Sub Tool folders for: light, black&white lights, human face, human hair, animals, nature, plants, clouds, action, etc.
SO MANY Sub Tool folders that searching through them was very time consuming.
So what I did was to separate all those folders into 6 main categories, and make each category its own tool.
First I’m going to show you how to make a Sub Tool folder into a main tool.
All you have to do is to drag any Sub Tool folder into the Tool palette and drop it there. A new tool will be created.
Then all you have to do is to drag any other Sub Tool folder you want into that same tool (not next to it as you just did, drag it and drop it right on that tool icon for it to become part of the same tool).
I divided my Sub Tools into 6 main category tools:
1) Action: for general action brushes (explosions and such), speed brushes and flash brushes.
2) Deco: for general adornments, adornments in B&W for manga, chains, hearts, stars, etc.
3) Human: for anything related to humans or living creatures. This includes hair brushes, clothes, jewels, animals, etc.
4) Light: for sparkles, particles, sun, etc.
5) Nature and BG: for all my tree, plant, flower, land, building, etc. brushes.
6) Manga and other: for all manga related brushes (crosshatching, filling, etc.) and any extra brush that doesn’t fit in any other category.
This is useful, but there’s a problem: each new tool’s icon changes to the icon of the latest Sub Tool you’ve used within that group, so sometimes it’s not very easy to tell what’s what.
This is where the Quick Access palette becomes your savior.
TIME SAVIOR: the Quick Access palette
Quick Access is a palette where you can put any functionality from the software to access it quickly: you can place menu commands, specific colors, specific tools, options, auto actions, etc.
Just click on the Quick Access setting by pressing the three-lined button next to the palette’s name to edit what you want to have in it.
Here you can select “Tool” to add an entire group of Sub Tools to the Quick Access palette (click “Add” after selecting your desired tool).
By doing this and arranging the “View” option to “List small” you’ll get the name of each tool on the Quick Access palette, making your new Sub Tool categorization much easier to surfer.
Now all my decoration brushes are much easier to find, making my workflow a lot faster!
Now it’s your turn to customize your workspace in a way that makes it easier for you to access your tools! It’s a process that takes time, but once you’re done, you’ll work so much faster, so I think it’s worth the effort.
Thank you for reading and have fun creating!
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