Inkarnate Layers Demystified

You've watched the same YouTube tutorial three times. You understand foreground and background in theory. But when you try to place a bridge over a river, the bridge vanishes. When you add trees around mountains, half of them disappear behind the peaks while the other half float in front. The layer system seems to have its own logic, and you're not in on the secret.

The secret is this: Inkarnate doesn't work quite like Photoshop. You can add, remove, rename, and reorder layers, but every layer has a specific type, and each type serves a different purpose. Once you understand which layer type does what, and how stamps interact within those layers, the system clicks into place.

The Two Fundamental Layer Types

Almost everything on your Inkarnate map lives on one of two fundamental layer types: brush layers and object layers. (Grids and filters each get a layer type of their own.) Confusing these is the source of most layer frustration.

Brush layers hold terrain textures. When you paint grass, water, stone, or sand across your map, you're working on brush layers. These textures fill areas and blend with each other. Brush layers are your foundation: the land, the sea, the cave floor.

Object layers hold stamps. Trees, mountains, buildings, decorations, icons. Anything you place as a discrete item rather than painting as a texture lives on an object layer. These are your details: the forests covering your hills, the cities dotting your coastline, the monsters lurking in your dungeon.

What decides which layer covers which is the order in the Layers panel: layers are rendered from bottom to top. A new map starts with its brush layers at the bottom and its Objects layer above them. This is why your painted cave floor appears beneath your placed torches, regardless of when you added each element.

Background, Foreground, and Top

Before Inkarnate 2.0, every map had the same three brush layers: Background, Foreground, and Top. Inkarnate 2.0 replaced that fixed set with custom layers that you can create, remove, rename, and reorder by drag and drop. Understanding what those three did still unlocks most of Inkarnate's creative potential.

The Background layer sat at the very bottom of the map. A new map in the Fantasy Battlemaps style still starts with a single brush layer called Background: it might be the void beneath a chasm, the rock behind cave walls, or the stone of a dungeon floor. On a new Fantasy World map the bottom brush layer is called Water (Brush) instead, and it holds your ocean or sea texture. Whatever you paint on this layer will be covered by anything on higher layers.

The Foreground layer sat above the Background. On a new Fantasy World map its place is taken by Land (Brush), a brush layer with a land mask. This is your landmass, and wherever the mask leaves a gap you see the water layer beneath. A new Fantasy Battlemaps map has no second brush layer until you add one. When you do, it plays the Foreground's old part: the platform players walk across, the cave floor where combat happens, or the wooden deck of a ship.

The Top layer sat above everything, stamps included. Inkarnate introduced it as a layer for painting textures and colors over everything, with light and shadow effects and snow among its suggested uses. A new map doesn't start with a Top layer, but any brush layer you drag above your Objects layer does the same job. Use one for terrain that needs to overlap your objects: cliff faces, raised platforms, the roof of a structure you're showing in cross-section.

A practical example: You're creating a cave battle map. Paint your dark void on the Background. Add a Land layer above it and, with the Land Tool set to Add, draw your stone floor there. Wherever you leave the floor undrawn, or remove it again with Subtract, the Background void shows through, creating pits and chasms. Then add a brush layer above the floor to paint elevated rock formations that rise above your floor level.

How the Land Tool Works (Formerly the Mask Tool)

The Land Tool is what separates land from water visually. When you use the Land Tool, you're not erasing anything. You're controlling where the land layer is visible and where it's transparent, revealing the layer beneath.

Think of the land layer as a sheet of paper with your land texture printed on it. The Land Tool cuts that paper to shape. Wherever the paper is missing, you see through to whatever's on the layer beneath. With Add selected, you draw new land. With Subtract selected, you remove land and reveal the water again.

This is why you don't need to carefully paint water textures around your coastlines. Paint your ocean texture across the entire Water (Brush) layer. Paint your land texture across the entire Land (Brush) layer. Then use the Land Tool to sculpt your coastline, revealing the ocean wherever you want it to appear. The coastline exists as a mask boundary, not as a careful painting job.

Each layer can have its own mask, and on a land layer the mask comes with customizable effects around the land shape. To give any other layer a mask, right-click it and choose Add Mask. You can toggle masks on or off for flexibility as you work. And because layer masks are edited with the Brush Tool in the current Inkarnate 2.0 system, the workflow feels familiar to anyone who's used image editing software.

Stamp Ordering Within Object Layers

Here's where many mapmakers get stuck. You've placed your mountains. You've placed your trees. But the trees are appearing in front of the mountains, and it looks wrong. You need the trees to sit behind the peaks, nestled into mountain valleys.

Stamps on the same object layer are ordered by depth, and the rule depends on the map style. On top-down styles such as battle maps, stamps are drawn in the order you placed them, with the most recent on top. On perspective styles such as world and regional maps, stamps higher on the canvas are drawn first and appear behind those positioned lower. In Inkarnate 2.0, you can create multiple object layers and reorder them using drag-and-drop in the Layers panel. This gives you control over groups of stamps.

The most common workflow: Create one object layer for background stamps (distant mountains, horizon details). Create another for midground stamps (forests, hills, large structures). Create a third for foreground stamps (vegetation at the map's edge, close-up details). Reorder these layers in the panel, and all stamps on a layer move together in the visual hierarchy.

Within a single layer, every stamp also has a Sublayer setting. Objects on sublayers with higher numbers are painted on top. You can select stamps and use the right-click context menu (Move Up, Move Down, Move Top, Move Bottom) to adjust their position within the layer. When you need fine control over which tree sits in front of which rock, this is your tool.

Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) adds a stamp to your selection or removes it, which helps when you need to reorder several stamps at once.

The Flatten Technique

Flattening is one of Inkarnate's most useful features, and one of its least understood. When you flatten a stamp, you convert it from an object into part of a brush layer. The stamp loses its individual identity and becomes part of the texture.

Why would you want this? Because flattened stamps behave differently. Once flattened to a brush layer, a stamp is no longer an object you can select and move. It's part of that layer's texture itself. You can paint over it, mask it, and layer other objects on top without worrying about selection conflicts.

A practical example: You've placed a mountain stamp but the shading on one side doesn't match your lighting. Flatten the mountain to your land layer. Now paint over the problematic area with terrain texture at low opacity, blending the mountain into your map's lighting. With the mountain still an object, paint on the land layer would go beneath it. (The other way to paint over a stamp is a brush layer placed above your objects.)

You can flatten objects to any brush layer on your map. Right-click the selection, open Flatten, and pick the layer. The flattened object then sits wherever that layer sits in the Layers panel, beneath every layer above it.

The limitation: once flattened, the object can no longer be selected. You can't move it or delete it as an object. Use flattening for stamps whose position you're certain about. Keep stamps you might need to adjust as objects.

Practical Layer Workflows

World Maps

Start with your Water (Brush) layer. Fill it with ocean texture. This is your sea, and it will appear everywhere your land isn't.

Move to your Land (Brush) layer. Fill it with a land texture (grass, earth, whatever your default terrain is). Now use the Land Tool to sculpt your continents. Add creates land. Subtract removes it and lets the ocean show through. Your coastlines form where the mask boundary sits.

Paint variation onto your land layer: deserts, forests, mountains ranges as texture (not stamps yet). The base terrain variations all live on the same Land (Brush) layer.

Now add stamps. Create an object layer for terrain stamps: mountains, hills, trees. Place these to add dimensionality to your flat texture. Create another object layer for locations: cities, points of interest, icons. Keep locations on a higher layer so they always render above terrain.

Add labels last, on the highest object layer. Labels should never be obscured by terrain.

Battle Maps

Battle maps often need more layers than world maps because you're working with structures, elevation changes, and interior spaces.

Paint your lowest surface on the Background layer. For a cave, this is the void. For a ship, this is the water beneath. For a building, this might be the floor of a lower level.

Build your primary surface on a Land layer. The Fantasy Battlemaps and Watercolor Battlemaps styles don't show the Land Tool until you add one, so choose Add Layer in the Layers panel and pick Land Layer. This is where your combatants will stand: the cave floor, the ship deck, the room floor. With the Land Tool, Add draws this surface and Subtract cuts parts of it away, revealing the Background beneath. These are your pits, your windows, your holes in the deck.

Add a brush layer above it for elevated terrain within the scene. A raised platform in a throne room. A rock formation rising from the cave floor. An upper deck section.

Add stamps in logical groups. Create object layers for: furniture and objects at floor level, objects on raised surfaces, and lighting effects (torches, glows). The grid sits on a grid layer of its own, which you can drag above or below the others.

Cave Maps

Caves require thinking about what's wall and what's walkable space. The common mistake is trying to paint walls as objects.

Instead, build your cave floor on a Land layer. Paint darkness or rock texture on the Background. Use the Land Tool to define where the floor exists. Everywhere without floor becomes wall, because the Background shows through.

Now the floor texture only appears where players can walk. The "walls" are simply the absence of floor, revealing the cave darkness beneath. This is faster and cleaner than trying to place wall stamps everywhere.

Add stamps for details: stalagmites, rubble, treasures, creatures. These sit on object layers above your painted floor, so they'll render correctly without fighting with your terrain.

Clip Masks: Advanced Layer Control

Inkarnate 2.0 gave clip masks a second mode, which gives you finer control over how objects interact with brush layers. Clip masks now have two modes, and understanding both opens new creative possibilities.

The first mode is "Brush Layer Below," the original behavior. When active, a clip mask stamp shows the texture of the nearest brush layer below its object layer in place of the stamps underneath it. Use this when you want to hide part of a stamp behind terrain, so it looks like it's physically part of the ground rather than sitting on top of it.

The second mode is "Erase." When active, the stamp erases any stamps beneath it in the same layer and reveals whatever is below. This is useful for creating cutouts, windows, or any situation where you want a stamp to punch through other content rather than sit on top of it.

Clip Mask is a checkbox on the stamps that support it, and the mode is set per object layer. Right-click the layer, open Layer Options, and choose its Clip Mode. Not every map needs clip masks, but when you're creating complex overlapping structures or terrain transitions, they're invaluable.

Common Layer Problems and Fixes

Stamps disappearing behind terrain. Your stamp is on an object layer that renders below the brush layer you're seeing. Move the stamp to a higher object layer, or drag the brush layer below the object layer in the Layers panel.

Can't select a stamp because another stamp covers it. Use the Objects Panel. Click directly on the stamp name in the list to select it, bypassing the visual overlap on the canvas.

Trees appearing in front of mountains when they should be behind. Either move the trees to a lower object layer than the mountains, or keep them in the same layer and move them to a lower sublayer (right-click, Move Down a Sublayer).

Mask changes not appearing. Verify you're editing the mask on the correct layer. With multiple brush layers, it's easy to paint mask changes on the wrong one. Check which layer is selected in the Layers panel.

Flattened stamp looks wrong. Remember that flattening locks the stamp into a brush layer, and once flattened it can no longer be selected. Get the stamp looking right before you flatten it.

Performance and Large Maps

Complex maps with many stamps can slow down Inkarnate's performance.

If your map lags, check your editing resolution. The editing resolution is separate from the export resolution, so you can work at a lower resolution while editing, then export at a higher one.

The Layer System Philosophy

Inkarnate's layer system isn't arbitrary. It reflects how maps are actually constructed. Real maps have a base layer (paper or terrain). On top of that sits painted or printed content (features, regions, textures). On top of that sit placed elements (icons, labels, decorations).

Brush layers are your base and your paint. They're permanent, foundational, and cover areas rather than points. Object layers are your placed elements. They're movable, adjustable, and discrete rather than continuous.

Work with this philosophy rather than against it. Don't try to use stamps for things that should be painted (large terrain areas, water, sky). Don't try to paint things that should be stamps (buildings, trees, icons). Each layer type exists for a reason, and using them correctly makes the whole system easier.

The layer system isn't a limitation to work around. It's a structure that organizes your creative decisions. Layers render from the bottom of the panel to the top: water beneath land beneath objects, until you reorder them. Masks reveal lower layers. Flattening commits objects to brush layers. Groups organize related stamps. Everything follows a consistent logic.

Once that logic clicks, you stop fighting the system. Your mountains stay behind your trees when you want them to. Your bridges cross your rivers instead of disappearing into them. Your cave floors stay beneath your torches, and your elevated platforms rise above your floors. The map looks like the image in your head, because you understand how to tell Inkarnate what you want.