working with masks for digital painting?

[Katatafisch]

hey people, i just recently made use of the mask tool for some illustrating, accidently found out how to use it
i wanted to ask if some of you people use it for illustrations or other stuff...
i mean its a good feature, once you defined the silhouette you can just concentrate on the rendering and form and so on, no need to worry about all the edges anymore, since they are already set...you can even control hard edge vs soft edge without the fear to ruin something...
do you guys think its a useful tool or its a tool for lazy people and beginners who dont dare to paint on one layer and arent able to care about edges all the time?!
would be interesting to hear some opinions

greetings,your katatafisch

[PlasticCup]

I don't use it, but I don't work on one layer either. You can always redefine edges with the eraser tool.

[Pieter]

I use masks whenever I want to do nondestructive erasing, want to seperate foreground/background elements or when I'm using adjustment layers.