The layer menu & masks

Right-click any layer in the Layers panel and a menu drops open with everything you can do to it — clipping masks, grouping, converting, the lot.

The structural moves — the ones that change what a layer *is* or how it relates to its neighbours — live here instead of cluttering the toolbar. Blend mode, opacity and draw order stay over in Properties; this menu is for the plumbing.

Clipping masks

Flip on Mask and the layer gets clipped to the one directly beneath it: the layer below becomes the shape, and your layer becomes whatever fills it. It's the trick for painting inside a silhouette, texturing a character without colouring past the edges, or trimming a background to a shape — and since nothing is erased, you can nudge either layer around and the mask just follows along.

Organising

• Group (Ctrl+G) folds the selected layers into a folder you can move, mask and animate as one thing.
• Link layers ties a few layers' transforms together without grouping them, so moving one moves the rest.
• Visible hides a layer without deleting it — handy for stashing reference or a rough pass.
• Lock freezes a layer so you can't nudge it by accident while you work on the ones above.

Converting a layer

• Convert to raster bakes a vector (or anything) down to pixels when you want to paint straight onto it.
• Convert to mesh wraps the layer in a deform mesh so you can bend, squash and warp it.
• Add mesh parent drops a mesh above the layer to drive that same warp from a parent.

The rest of the menu

• Duplicate and Delete do exactly what they say.
• Onion skin turns the ghosting on or off just for this layer.
• Layer effects opens the effects window for the layer, and colour tags let you flag layers so a busy rig stays readable.