Me gots Illustrator and Photoshop CS2!

I was using Photoshop Elements before. Now... How do I use all this crap? Specifically, the pen tool. Anyone know any tricks with that?

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Use Farlows's tutorial for the pen thing. That should pretty much sum it up.

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Thanks, Rox.

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Pen... tool... so... confusing.... *Brain 'splodes*

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Do you have a tablet?

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The pen tools is REALLY useful once you get the hang of it. Try tracing over some pictures and reading a ton of tutorials.

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End Of Man - Ill/emp Troller <- First 50.
Robosaurus - Robo/Dark <- Second 50
Urban Viking - BS/Regen <- Unplayed
*Altaholic*

Yep, I have a Wacom. The small one.

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If you're inking with the tablet, use Illustrator and the brush tool. I know some people use Photoshop for inkin', but I don't know why. Illustrator gives nice, clean, vectorized lines, and you can make things mighty perty with the right settings on the stylus.

If I can find this one tutorial that I came across the other night, I'll post it here. It was a really helpful comic artist's tutorial blog. Now if I could just remember his name...

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Okay, the pen tool is misleading, as it doesn't ACTUALLY work like a pen tool in real life. The pen tool is basically to make perfect curves and paths that you couldn't normally do by a tablet.

Basically, take the pen tool, click a bunch of points, then find the Convert Point tool (on mine, it's under the same pulldown menu as the Pen Tool). Using that, hover over a point and drag. That will make a curve. You can adjust the curve by dragging the dot things that come out of the point. Do this with every pen point as you see fit.

Once you get the curved path you want, right click and use Make Selection, Fill Path, or Stroke Path (depending on what you want). Stroke will go over the path with whatever settings you have on your brush at the moment, so make sure you have the Brush Tool you want set up (including color) before right clicking and hitting Stroke Path. You can also use tools other than Paintbrush to stroke (at least on mine you can) in a pulldown menu that pops up.

Last thing: after you make the stroke, it probably won't be readily visible, since the path is still overlaying it. Find your Paths window (same window as Layers and Channels), then hit new path. Since this new path has nothing on it, the old path won't show and the stroke should be visible. If you wan't to work with the old path for whatever reason, just click on it in the Paths window.

Hope that helps.

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It does help.


One thing tho', when I tried to do fill path, it was greyed out..?

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What do you mean by greyed out?

Edit: Oh, okay. If it's greyed out, then make sure that the path you want is active (meaning, go into the paths window and click on the path again). You'll know it's active when it's highlighted after you click it. Then, take any tool under the Pen Tool pulldown menu (any will work), right click, and hit Fill Path.

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In the dropdown menu, it's greyed out, meaning I can't click on it. The difference between this and this...



Ah, ok. I'll try that. Thanks, Aaron!

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[ QUOTE ]
Yep, I have a Wacom. The small one.

[/ QUOTE ]

ohh me too. its not that hard, but im no expert. Im pretty new to it. i think its been about 2 weeks since ive had it.

[u]Couple Tips[u]
*make sure you set the pen tip to a drawing tool and the pen eraser to eraser.
*sketch something (or find a black and white sketch/drawing on google or somethin) and scan it into you computer. Then trace over it.
*before you do you anything it would probably be a good idea to go through all/most/some of the features and tools to get familiar with what they do.

^i no its not very many tips and youve probably already done them, but just thought id throw my "advice" in there.

-Spade

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Still not working, Aaron.

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[ QUOTE ]
In the dropdown menu, it's greyed out, meaning I can't click on it. The difference between this and this...



Ah, ok. I'll try that. Thanks, Aaron!

[/ QUOTE ]

Try deselecting the path, then using the black arrow selection tool to reselect -- it should not only be highlighted, but have the bounding box around it. Sometimes this is what happens when I try to stroke or fill a path.

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