Having a masking issue which I hope someone can explain to me. The image below is from a snake painting. It shows a piece of the image and the layer. I want to put a soft, feathered gray stripe along the body of the snake. I first used a hard brush to paint in a broad gray stripe. I set the blend mode to multiply. I attached a black mask. I then used a soft white brush over the black mask to reveal the stripe. I was able to use the mask properties to adjust the feathering until I had the appropriately soft edge. There are two issues that puzzle me: (1) Notice that there are certain segments that are sharp rather than feathered. One possible explanation is that I feathered the mask to a point where the opacity of the mask was insufficient to conceal the sharp edge of the original brush stroke. However, if that were the case, I would expect that condition would obtain uniformly, not in segments. (2) If, for example, I use a black brush at full opacity to clean-up the gray that spills over the snake body (image, upper left), the black brush has no effect. It does not hide the gray. Same in the lower area. A black brush will hide gray areas except where the edge is sharp. There is no layer projecting anything from higher in the layer stack. As expected, if I hide the layer, the gray disappears. If I disable the black mask, the hard gray stroke is completely revealed. I.E., everything works as expected, except for the issues I described. The problem is easy to work around. I'm just curious about what is happening here. Thanks.
... View more