Tips for Your Pen Tool
If you are new to
Photoshop, you hate the pen tool. If you have been using
Photoshop for awhile, you love it. Why is this? Well, let me
show you a few tips that might help you fall in love with
your pen tool.
The pen tool or Bezier as
it is called in some circles is a great feature. It allows
you to be really bad at drawing by hand because you can get
curves and lines close to perfect, and then adjust them
afterwards if you need to. Let's start with the basics.
Select your pen tool and
get a clean canvas. This is how the pen tool works.
1. When you click once,
you start a new anchor point, or a point of junction.
2. If you draw the line
out (you don't have to hold the button), it creates a
straight line.
3. If you click again
somewhere and let go immediately, it creates a sharp angle.
4. If you click again
somewhere, hold the button down and "pull" the mouse, you
create a rounded curve.
5. When you have created
all the anchor points you desire, you can select the direct
selection tool. It's a white arrow in the tool bar above the
pen, and make adjustments to the path you have created.
For the most part, that's it. There are a few other details
to the pen tool, but the basics are exactly that.
Somebody told me an
analogy awhile back and it really made a difference for me.
Imagine your pen tool is a car. The edge of the object you
are drawing is a road that you are driving down. Now every
time you come to a curve, you have to hold the button down
and steer towards that curve. That will create a pretty
close approximation for what you want to do. Remember that
if the turn is abrupt, you just click and let go so that it
is a sharp angle.
The other thing that
should help you is practice. Nobody masters that pen tool on
the first try. You have to experiment and make mistakes to
get it right. It's sort of like riding a bike. It takes
awhile, but once you get it, you never forget.
Below I have created a
oval shape and then traced around it with the pen tool.
Notice the points at which I made anchors. Keep that driving
analogy in mind when you do so. Now these points and curves
are not perfectly precise, but that's OK, because I can go
back and make some minor adjustments if I need to.
Here I have made a star with sharp edges and did the same
thing, only I clicked and let go at the anchor points to
make sharp angles.
To give you something to play around with, I
have created a few objects for you to trace. Just save this
image, bring it into Photoshop and then have at it. If you
can trace these perfectly, you are off to a great start.
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