Photoshop Pen Tool Tutorial (Tattoo Design)

hello this is Gary Simon with the design letter and designcourse decom in this tutorial we're going to take a look at one tool and one tool only and that is the pen tool and let's go ahead and just get started right now go to file new and I have it set at 800 X5 500 you can use the same if you want otherwise if you have a bigger desktop resolution than me cuz I'm doing it small just so you guys can see most of everything uh you can just set that at a higher pixel count so um it's setting me at 66.7% if that is doing the same for you just take the magnifying glass tool click once and that brings us to 100 you may have to click twice though depending on what your resolution is so let's go ahead and get started let's uh click on our foreground color and change it to Black hit okay and with the pen tool selected make sure up here it says shape layers um which is selected the other one's paths okay so with shape layer selected Let's uh just real quickly overview how the pen tool works we can create lines like this just by left clicking and you can see it begins to fill in whatever we want to do very easy uh so let's go back and contrl Z then Control Alt z a bunch of times to go back to the beginning all right so we can create straight lines very easily I if we want to create curved lines we can do that with tangents and the way you do that let's just click right here drag this time and do not click and let go so if we drag out we can see it really we can create any type of curve we want and then you can see um this line right here will affect wherever we put the next point now we can go back and actually edit these as well by holding alt and then just clicking them and as you can see we can really change it in any direction that we wish so that's how for the most part the Pento works so I'm going to get straight into uh creating a really cool looking tattoo um and we'll see that we can get it done very quickly I so let's get started go ahead and just try to follow along as best as you can so let's click right here then hold shift and click right here that creates a perfect line that forces a perfect line we can also do that for vertical and 45 degree angles now while still uh holding the mouse button we're going to drag up and then come right around here we want the same distance apart and then hold shift and there we go we just click once now let's click right here and drag out and then fix finish it there now as you can see it's kind of overlapping it went too far that tangent that was affected there uh so the way we can fix lines after we've already closed the shape let's click right here to get rid of that uh the uh path from showing now let's click right here we have two different uh tools you drag out and click we have direct selection tool well if we click right here we can see these tangents so just click and hold and now we brought it in so that it doesn't uh overlap anymore so let's take our move tool let's right click over here in the shape hit duplicate layer hit okay we're going to move it up right click duplicate again because we're going to create a third one get rid of the path and let's move it up now if you need more fine control just use your arrow keys and that uh will fix it okay so now we have this cool looking design here uh what else can we add well really that's a part of uh creativity you can add anything you want but right now I'm just doing this to show you what the pen tool can do so let's click right here with the pen tool and then right around here and then create like a like an arc over these three designs that we created now hold the ALT key and click right on the last Anchor Point that will get rid of any tangent affecting the next point so let's go go back to the first point and close it up and drag and there we go uh let's go ahead duplicate that by right clicking duplicate layer hit okay now let's take the bottom one the very first one and change it to White then you just do you just double click there and then change the color now let's go to the move tool and use our error Keys hit down and left a few times creates like a little Shadow there now let's take these two layers you can select them by holding control right click duplicate layers hit okay contrl t hold shift and drag out to create like a bigger one right here just above it select the move tool hit apply now we're going to select the original two these ones right here and do the same exact thing we're going to duplicate it again duplicate layer hit okay now let's move them above now all three of them are kind of low just um I want to readjust them a little bit so select a top layer hold shift and then select the bottom layer for these three that we created and just move them up all right so so far we have a pretty cool looking uh design but we can add a little bit more to it so I'm going to zoom in right around here with the magnifying glass tool and just drag out go back to our pen tool click right around here and then right right around here and drag hold the ALT key then select the Anchor Point once and then come back to the original point and drag out and create something like that now let's go back over here and do the same thing pen tool select here hold here drag out hold the ALT key click the Anchor Point come back to the original drag out end it right there right click actual pixels and there we go if you want to move it more just select the move tool use your arrow key all right uh let's do one more of the one thing over here just for the fun of it um let's change the color up here to White and let's select right around here drag out right here in the middle of this part try to make it follow the the the the same path and then let click right here all right and then do the same thing let's move this over to the bottom one which is the opposite area alt click Bring It Back Drag and there we go right click actual pixels and there we go we have a really cool looking uh design here and the the possibilities are obviously endless with this um real quickly to show you something else say for example you wanted to do your signature well this is where this tool would come in which is the path tool let's create a new layer new layer hit okay and let's make sure we have black selected for a foreground now the difference with this tool is that you see it doesn't really fill in anything it's just the path alone nothing gets filled in it's very important to remember that um let me go back here now let me do let's just try to do our signature this is a real good way to get familiar with the pen tool my name is Gary so I'm just going to do Gary real quick there we go now if I rightclick go to stroke path use the brush hit okay right click and then delete the path guess what we have our uh signature so that's how the path tool kind of works and you can do other things with the path tool as well which I will get into in future tutorials uh I'm going to go ahead and delete that layer and there we go uh this is our tattoo uh like I said possibilities are endless and uh that is it go ahead and check out designcourse decom you'll see a promo video at the end of this and if you think this tutorial is cool you'll see some really awesome tutorials that will show you full website design and logo design all right talk to you later [Music] n [Music]