[The above image is an e-card I had worked on, but then dropped 'cause it looked a bit ugly. :P]
One of the most important things to know about for wallpapers and e-cards is layers.
How do layers work?
My favorite way to explain this is to imagine each layer as a sheet of plastic. When you draw different things on each plastic sheet and place them above each other, some parts can be seen, and others can't, right? There's some parts that are transparent, which allows you to see what's below it. That's the same as how layers work.
Layers for wallpapers and e-cards are used for many purposes. It's used to create the texture, to edit the picture, to crop one picture and place it on top of another, etc. When making a wallpaper, one may use up to 20 or more layers (depending on how complicated the wallpaper is). When making an e-card, it usually takes maximum of about 10 layers, unless if you're putting together many images onto 1 e-card. In the above e-card example, because I edited it a lot, it used about 11 layers.
Ok, so you may be wondering why I made this tutorial although it doesn't show the use of layers. It's just to get you to understand the basics before I go off to spinning about textures, cropping, and whatnot. You may get lost if you do not fully understand how layers work. :D
Quick overview:
[x] Layers work like plastic sheets of paper.
[x] Layers are important to create textures, edit a picture, or to crop and place one picture onto another.
