Hello everyone,

   In this tutorial I’ll try to learn you all a bit about the Pen Tool. Which I know, is one of the most difficult tools in Photoshop. I won’t be able to tell you every inch of the Pen Tool, but I hope that after you read this tutorial you learned at least a little bit. Also note, this is not a tutorial which will lead to 1 specific end-result. The purpose is to explain a specific tool.

   The Pen icon looks like this: At least, the front icon. The arrow in the right corner shows us that you are able to select different Pen Tool options by right clicking it. We’ll talk about this later. The Pen Tool is used to create paths. With paths, you are able to create vector line drawings. Vector means that you are able to create the size of the paths without any degradation. With paths, you’ll also be able to easily see what effect you’ll achieve by adding or removing a path. Paths are also used to select objects out of a picture or drawing. Because it’s very easy to edit the shape of your paths it’s much easier than for example the Lasso Tool.

   We have different kind of paths, straight and curved line paths. The difference is pretty self explaining, but I’ll post an example image showing the difference:

  As you can see, the upper line is a straight path and the one below is a curved path. As you can see on the image, there is a line pointing out from the curved path. These lines are called direction lines, and the black box that is on the end of these direction lines is called a direction point. Pretty easy eh! The anchor points of the curved line are both white, once they are selected they will appear black. You’re able to select multiple anchor points at once by holding shift and using the Direct Selection Tool.

   Straight lines do not have direction lines, curved lines have! The shape of the curved lines is controlled by these direction lines, thus making them super important.

   Now that you know about this, we shall take a look at the different Pen Tool options. When you right-click the Pen Tool, this menu will show:

 - The Pen Tool. This is the tool you’ll use the most. With the Pen Tool you’re able to create the paths we’ve been talking about.

 - The Freeform Pen Tool. With this tool you’re able to create paths quickly by drawing freely with the mouse.

 - The Add Anchor Point Tool. You’ll be able to add additional anchor points in a path which you already created. Thus splitting a line segment into two parts. This would be useful if you already created a curve, but want the shape to be more complex.

 - The Delete Anchor Point Tool. This is the opposite of the Add Anchor Point Tool. You’ll be able to remove anchor points with this one. Might come in handy if you created too many segments. You’ll probably need this when you use the Freeform Pen Tool.

     - The Convert Point Tool. You’ll be able to convert a smooth anchor point to a corner anchor point, and the other way around. I’m not very experienced with this one yet, so I’m not sure if we’ll talk about this.

It took me a while to figure out what the P after Pen Tool and Freeform Pen Tool means. If you are using the Pen Tool, and you hit Shift + P, you’ll switch to the Freeform Pen Tool. This also works the other way around.

   
If you misplaced an anchor point, but still want to use it, you don’t have to delete it. You can use the Direct Selection Tool to move the anchor point. You can find this tool under the black mouse pointer on the toolbar. If you select the Path Selection Tool, you’ll be able to move the whole path. You can also hold Shift while selecting. Now you are able to select more than one anchor points or paths. You can also use this to move paths by the way.

   Ok, when you created a path there are several things you can do. You can make the paths into a selection. To do this, click on the Paths tab in the Layers palette. Now right-click the path you want to be a selection. Select Make Selection, now you can enter the Feather Radius. If you don’t know what this is, enter the value 0. You are also able to Fill and Stroke a path. What this will do is pretty obvious. I want to learn you one more technique which I think is pretty cool, and it can really give you some nice effects like this:

I made this using the Pen Tool and this special technique. Start by creating a path, I advice working path by path. So first a flower, then a leaf, another leaf and then the stem. If you are done with your path, go to the Brush Tool. Put the Master Diameter to around 6-7 px. Now go to your path, right click it and select Stroke Path. Select Brush and then select the Simulate Pressure option. This takes some time to experiment with, but I think it looks pretty cool.

 I hope you all enjoyed this tutorial. Hopefully you’ll be able to use this knowledge for your future works. I wish you all the best,

   Gruzz.

If you want any more information, please ask and I'll add to the tutorial!

Nice tutorial!

And nice rose too

Thank you. I had to have a high quality 2000th post. Now try to make something like the rose yourself.

Gruzz this is perfect! Thanks for very good and explained tutorial about pen tool!

I ve never seen that kind of a beatuifull rose.     Its very good!

I will learn how to draw with pen tool right away!!!

Gruzz!  Thanks again.  Your tutorial helped me a lot!

Here is something that I maded in 2 minutes. Its not good as yours surelly,but I can make it better then it is.  

Its maded in gimp.

there i did

Your leaf is perfect!  Oh god,I need to buy Photoshop!  These gradients in GIMP are killing me!

Nice one!  

very good work Gruzz i have to learn work with this tool!!!

Thank you very much CiNy! Not much people replying yet..

very nice man and thx sooooooo much for that useful tuto.

Well thank you DeadDrAgO. I'm glad that you like my tutorial, and you should surely show some results. Please don't reply to a lot of tutorial topics just for fun or to raise your post count. You can reply if you for example want to thank the author or show your result. Doing this with more then 5 topics in the same hour is a problem though. I hope you'll understand that this behavior is not acceptable.

thanks dude now i know how to make it.

You're more then welcome!

Well... Thanks Gruzz. I know how to draw icon properly,but how can I paint it like you did for example.
Its not just a gradient.

Are you talking about the rose? Well that was just hand collored with the Brush Tool. It's a bit of a specific style with one light and one dark color on every part of the object.

Very nice tutorial, Gruzz!

Ok there is a little something I have a question over regarding the pen tool.  I think it might be useful to others if it is in this topic.

When you are creating a new shape using the pen tool, how do you extract certain spots from the path?

To explain more...

To take out the inside "blank" areas of this tire.

If I would have to do that, I'd do it on the following way:
- Make the path into a selection. And fill the selection in a new layer with a color, now deselect.
- Select the white parts with the Magic Wand Tool, or in some images (probably not in your image, but just saying this here) even better this way:
Go to Select -> Color Range. Then Eyedrop on the white, experiment with the fuzziness and voila, there's your selection (hopefully! Especially works well with images where you'd spend hours with the selection. There are also other selection possibility's of course, just pick what you like best!
Make sure the layer is selected which you had filled with that color. Hit delete, and the parts are removed.

If this is not what you meant, and you want to make these white boxes already outside with the paths, then do read on. I think this is possible. Make sure you give the path you showed in the image a name (else it'll just remove it). Now make a new path, selecting all white things. Now you can just say, make a selection of Path 1 and remove the parts of this selection which show in Path 2. I have never tried this, but almost certainly that it'll work. If it doesn't, blame me.   The main positive point of this second way is that you can expand your paths, because paths are vectorizing.

Ah thanks!  The second was what I was meaning.  Much appreciated.  Will try that now.

How did it went? I'm pretty interested to see whether it can be achieved.

Actually it was not what I was after... That was good at getting something down, but not to create a custom shape.  Still looking for how to do that...

Ok I dug into this a little more now! (that's the responsibility you got when making the only Pen Tool tutorial for the English section ) I found out that it is indeed possible! And it's even easier then I could imagine. Start with for example the image you have provided us. You already made a path on this one. All you got to is select the Pen Tool, and then look at the properties that you can select. Right from the check box 'Auto add/delete', you can see four options. Option two is called 'Subtract from path area (-)' and you'll have to use this. Now just draw another path in the path layer that we already made before. Hopefully you can achieve the desired result now!

Ah!  Holy **** ... I cannot believe I did not see that in the first place.  Thanks!  Now back to doing what I was doing.  Thanks!!!  MUCH appreciated!  Will see that I show what I did when finished

Ok as promised

This is only the first "draft"...

Had to get it a shape so I could resize it in the background without all kinds of aliasing.  Though I do think the tires still could use a good bit of work.

Thanks Gruzz, for the tipps