In the old, predigital days, when I was working on a perspective drawing, I would make several versions, each on a new piece of tracing paper. The tracing paper obscured the underlying drawing just enough that I could clearly see the new drawing. This allowed me to be fairly loose with the first drawing and then clean it up on a new piece of paper.
You will do the digital equivalent of this tracing paper process. Add a new layer, fill it with white, and turn down the transparency so you can see the drawing underneath. Rename the new layer TracingPaper. Now, merge all of the drawing layers into one or two layers. If you have any guides that you want to keep for later use, such as the ellipse bank or circle divisions, put them on one layer. Rename the layer with the drawing so far RoughDrawing.
Figure 5-24: Rough castle drawing
Each layer of tracing paper obscures the underlying layers slightly more. You want to see the concept sketch the least, so it will be under two layers of Trace Paper. You want to see the rough drawing more clearly, so it will be under one layer of Trace Paper. You need to see the clean drawing best of all, so it’s on top, with no Trace Paper layer. Here’s how to stack them (Figure 5-25):
. Doing so turns the line work black. Press OK to close Levels.
2. Duplicate the TracingPaper layer, and move this copy above the RoughDrawing layer. Name it TracePaperTop.
3. Start a new layer on top of the stack, and call it DrawingFinal.
4. Adjust the transparency of the lowest Trace Paper layer to 50 percent so you can still see the concept painting somewhat.
5. Set the top TracingPaperTop layer to 40 percent opacity so you can see the RoughDrawing layer more clearly than the concept sketch.
If you’ve followed this process correctly, you should be able to see clearly a mark made on the DrawingFinal layer.
Figure 5-25: Tracing paper setup
A copy of the file prepared to do the final drawing is on the DVD as Castle_Clean_Drawing.psd, with the DrawingFinal layer left blank. You’ll create the final clean drawing on top of this stack. Use the rough drawing as the primary guide to produce the clean perspective drawing. Depending on how rough your first version is, you may need to go through a couple of iterations to arrive at the final clean drawing. When you have the final clean drawing, place a new layer behind it, and fill that layer with 100 percent white to block out all the older versions.
Keep all the guides on a separate layer in case you ever need to come back and rework the project. Save the final perspective drawing (Figure 5-26). You can check out the final flattened demonstration drawing in the Chapter 5 DVD materials: Castle_Final_Drawing.jpg