Fun with the Pen Tool
Are you ready to have some FUN, ladies and gents? Good, 'cause you're about to. At the very least, you'll learn a little about the many nifty abilities the pen tool has to offer.Getting to Know the Pen Tool
First of all, let's open up a new image. I chose a nice little square, but rectangles work fine as well. Well, select your pen tool on the left. It is, obviously, the one that looks like a pen.
Alright. Go ahead and make a point with your pen tool. Make sure that up at the top, you've got the right option selected. The pink in the image will show ya.
Okay, make another point. Before releasing your mouse button, if you move the mouse around the curve of the pen tool will change.
Now, hold down the alt button and mouse over the second point you made. You'll see that the pen tool gets a little upside-down 'v' thing next to it. Clicking on the point now will allow your next line to flow smoothly. If you don't close the point...
You'll get a funny-looking line like the one shown above. We don't want that, so go back by hitting ctrl + alt + z, and close your point. (Again, that's alt + click).
Go ahead and close your shape by clicking on the first point you made. As you can see, I made mine a bit curved so that it passed over the first curve I made. Now, you can adjust the line a bit more, if you'd like. by holding alt and clicking on any point on the line, the points will show again, along with the 'handles'. If you continue to hold down the alt button, you can mess with the handles of the different points by clicking on the handles' points. Alt + clicking in the middle of a point will reset it to a straight line. If you hold down ctrl on the keyboard and click on a point, you can move it around.
Now that you've got this nice little line here, you can do quite a few things on it by right-clicking. You can:
Fill it, by right clicking and selecting 'Fill path...'.
Stroke it, by right clicking and selecting 'Stroke path...'.
Or, you can make your line a selection by right-clicking and selecting 'Make selection...'.
Now, you know quite a lot about the basics! Let's get on to doing something useful, shall we?
Cutting out an Object
Coming soon. D:
