On 11/2/18 10:43 PM, Subsquentual wrote:

Okay so this is something I figured out a few years ago on an older version of GIMP. I'm coming back to it now and have updated it to the newest version as of November 2018. And now I cannot figure this out.

So say I have a layer with a picture and I have base colors down. Now I want to shade an area of the picture. To do this I open a new layer and choose a dark color, usually a grey, and change it's opacity and mode until it looks right to me.
To shade the area, I would have to carefully outline the space on the new layer to keep the shading from getting to another area that I do not want shaded.

Now I do all of my coloring on separate layers, like a layer for a shirt, a layer for pants, hair, ect that way I don't have to worry about mucking things up later.

Locking the Alpha Channel keeps me from going past the area that has already been filled. Basically it keeps you from coloring outside of the lines. So what I need is to have a layer already filled, make a new transparent layer, and lock it's alpha channel to the layer below it, so I can shade easier without going out of bounds for that area.

I remember I did it in an older version of GIMP a long time ago, but the new interface has me all jumbled and I can't seem to figure it out now.

Any help? Please and thank you...

I don't think there is a way to do that with plain Gimp, but writing a script to do it is trivial, so you could have such a script before.