Make Custom Shapes in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Make Custom Shapes in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, make custom shapes in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating shapes in Photoshop. We're going to use the pen tool, so I'm going to show you a bit about using the pen tool and also how you can subtract shapes from each other and get the intersection of them. What are called Boolean operators for shapes but that's probably about the last time I'm going to use the word Boolean. We're going to simplify that a whole lot more for you. Now, as you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, which is one click, and then write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to find my classes and also to determine if they are going to enjoy them too. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now let's get started creating shapes in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 - Pen Tool Primer: Before we start on our shapes, I'm just going to do a basic introduction to the pen tool for anybody who is really freaked out by the pen tool. If you can draw a rectangle and a basic curved line with the pen tool, then skip ahead to the next video and we'll look in that video at adding paths together and subtracting them and finding the intersection of them, which are tools which will allow us to create more complex shapes. But if you're beginning with the pen tool, just create a new document. I went to file new, I created something as 2000 by 2000 pixels in size, it doesn't really matter right now since we're only working with the pen tool. I'm going to press control or command zero to zoom this up to full size of the screen, and I'm going to the pen tool here. It shares a toolbar position with a free form pen tool, a couple of other tools for adding and deleting anchor points and one for converting a point. But it's pen tool that you'll want. To create a shape with straight sides with the pen tool, you're just going to click and just click all the way around to create your shape. When you come back to the beginning, when you hover over the starting point, you'll find that your cursor changes a little bit, has a little zero off to the bottom right edge, and that's telling you you're hovering over the starting point, and if you click once, you're just going to close your shape. Now, I'm just going to delete that path and let's go and see what's happening here. You may not see this line appearing as you're dragging the mouse around, and if you don't see that line appearing, you need to know what it is and how to get it. It's called a rubber band, and it's here in the setting. So just click on the settings for the pen tool, and you'll see a rubber band option, and so you want to turn rubber band on so that you can see where you're going if you like. That just makes it easier to work with path. So there's my closed path. Let's have a look at a curved path. So again with a pen tool, instead of just clicking, you're going to click and drag all in one move. So you got to press with the left mouse button as you click and drag, and when you do that, you get these handles. As soon as I lift my finger off the left mouse button, you'll see that I have these handles and they're controlling the curvature of the line. These are called Bezier curves, which is just a fancy name for beautiful curves. But these are very fundamental to creating shapes in Photoshop. So it's worthwhile getting a bit of a feel for creating them. Now, as you can see the rubber band effect is showing me what my shape is going to be like so I'm going to click and drag here. Again, I've got my finger on the left mouse button and until I let go, I can twist this curve around wherever I want it to go. Now, I'm heading off in this direction over here. So I can create a subtle curve by just dragging up, and I'm going to finish it off about here. To finish off a line like this, which is a curved line, I'm just going to hold control or command on the Mac and just click away from the line, and that just finishes the drawing. Now I can go here to the path selection tool, it's the black arrow key. There's two here, there is a direct selection and a path selection. Path selection let's you select the entire path. So you can see that we've got these little nodes here along this path. Whenever you're drawing a path, it's wise to make sure that your nodes are on a straight that you wouldn't want a node to be up here if you could possibly help it, or here or here when you're making a sharp turn because it's really hard to get your turns really smooth. It's easier to get them smooth when you're turning on a straight stretch if you like. Now, if we go to the direct selection tool here, we can click on a node and we can see it's handles. Now, when you can see it's handles, you can actually adjust it's handles. So we could come here and just drag this up a little bit, and this one down. The further you drag it down, the bigger that path becomes, and you can also twist it. You can do really weird things and double twist it, but you don't want to get into that too much. You really want a bit more control over your handles. Now, you can also pull the anchor point and position it where you want it to be. Pull this one out, you can see that I'm starting with a much bigger curve. So once you've made your curves, you can always change them by just adjusting them. Now, it's also possible to turn points from these points that have handles through them into ones that don't. So let's just go and create a new line. So I just want to do something here, I'm going to do a line up here and put a curve on a corner, and let's go across to here. So when I select it with the direct selection tool, which allows me to look at these points, you'll see that there's a point here, a point here, and a point here, and this one here has handles on it. If we didn't want that to have handles, we could convert that point. So we'll go to, and say pen tool to open up this little fly out menu, and go to the convert point tool. When I click on this point, it loses it's handles. The handles totally disappear so that when I select it next, it has no handles, nothing that we can use to make it a curve line. If you have a point like this and you want to make it curved, then you can use the convert anchor point to actually add handles to it. So here this time when I click on this point, just click and drag a little bit, I get my handles back. Then once I've got my handles, I can go to my direct selection tool and just adjust these handles. These handles are operating independently of each other so I can make them as long or as short as I like. But if I want to take one handle around, and not the other, then I'm going to need to hold the Alt or option key once I've actually started moving the handle, and that will allow me to just take one and not the other. Once they're broken from each other, then they're going to behave independently. Now, armed with this information, let's go and have a look at this particular document, and I've got a couple of curves in this document. I'm going to show you how to make these curves using the pen tool. I'm just going to turn them off, and let's go and get the pen tool. Now, the subtle curve is just very simply created by dragging upwards with the pen tool. Click and drag upwards. If you hold the shift key, then your line is going to go in a perfectly vertical direction. I'm going to come down here and find pretty much the same position as I was in previously, and I'm going to click and drag downwards again holding the shift key to try and get this nice curve. When I let go of the mouse button, you can see that I'm now headed up in this direction. So I'm going to again, look for a point pretty near to this one, and click and drag upwards, adding the shift key to make it a nice straight even curve. Let go of the mouse, click and drag downwards holding shift just to make that nice curve. Find my position here, click and drag upwards holding the shift key to get this nice curve. Once I'm finished, I can control click away from it, or I could also press the escape key. So there's my nice up and down curve. The other shape that we had that we were looking at here was this curve here. So I'm going to draw that next. I've actually put in a guideline here that is handy to use. Let's just go and get rid of it, I'll show you how to add this guide. Start off by choosing view and make sure that rulers are visible because you need these rulers visible. You can just drag down with your mouse a guide off the ruler line that has come with you, either the vertical or the horizontal ruler line. When you don't want to guide any longer, just pick it up with the move tool and just toss it away. But this guide is going to help me create that really nice letter M shape. Back to the pen tool, I'm going to click on the line to start, I'm going to drag up holding the shift key so that I get that nice curve. Then come to here, again, holding the shift key, drag down exactly the same way as I drew the first line. But once I let go the mouse button, what I need to do at this point is to move this handle up to here. So I'm going to hold the Alt or option key and just drag the handle up. Now because I've got the rubber band turned on, you can see I'm heading in the exact right direction. Click, drag down, hold the shift key to constrain it to that nice loop. Let go of the left mouse button. Hold the Alt or option key so I can swing this handle around. Let go of everything. Click and drag downwards, add the shift key to get a nice loop. Let go of everything. Hold the Alt or option key, swing the handle around, and we're off again. Click and drag downwards, hold the shift key to get a nice curve. Let go of everything. Alt or option key, swing the handle around, and we're back to making our last curve. Click and drag downwards, hold the shift key to get that nice curve, and now we're finished, I can just press the escape key or press the control key and click outside the curve. Now of this line, this was just a guide and this is the actual curve that I've created, that's a pen path, and we can do lots of things with those pen paths. So if you're not familiar with this, just take a few minutes to go over this video, draw a couple of lines, and you're ready to get started creating some shapes in Photoshop, and we're going to do that in the next video. 3. Pt 2 - Make a Reflected Shape: Assuming that you've got a fair handle on using the pen tool, let's go and create our first shape. This is going to be a reflected shape. I'm going to choose File, New. Just make a document 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels, white background. This is the document I'm going to be using throughout this video. We're going to go do that file new thing again. You can just go ahead and create a document that is that size. I press "Control" or "Command zero" to increase the size of the documents so that would fill the screen. I have my rulers turned on, choose View and then Rulers to turn them on. It's also important to have Snap turned on. So you want to check mark next to snap and you want snap to guides enabled because we're going to use a guide to create half a shape that we are going to reflect and stick together to make a reflected shape. Now, that we've got that started, let's go and drag a guide off this ruler. All you do is just click and drag over the ruler and a guide comes with you. So click, drag and there's your guide. The guides can be moved using the move tool, and if you don't want one any longer, just drag it off the document and it disappears. This one needs to be just about in the middle, doesn't need to be exactly, there's nothing exact about this right now. Going to the pen tool and it's really important up here that you have the word path selected. We're going to draw a half of a heart. We're going to position ourselves over this line here, this guide, and we're going to click and drag heading towards the top left corner of the document. Now, we don't want to put a point on the curve of a path, that's not a good idea if you can possibly help not doing that. I'm going to put it on this straight side, so I'm going to click and drag here as I'm heading down towards making the bottom of my heart. At the bottom I'm just going to click once. So that's half a heart. But I need to stop this from happening, so I'm going to press "Escape" or I could control click "Command" click in the document to do that. I'm going to my direct selection tool because this is going to allow me to make a better half of a heart. I don't want to move this point of this line, I want it to be on that line snapped to it, but these points I can shape. This point is pretty good, just want it to be on that line. Now, that we're finished with the direct selection tool, we're going to path selection tool. The path selection tool lets me select this path. I need to make a duplicate of it, so I need a second copy. I'm just going to choose Edit, Copy and then Edit, Paste. That just paste a duplicate of this path right on top of the other ones, so there are two here now. In fact, if I move this other way, you can see that there's a second one here. Now, we want to flip this, but with it selected, if you try and choose Edit, Transform Path, there's a good chance that Flip Horizontal is not going to be enabled, which makes you think that you can't flip it horizontally. You can, you just have to get Photoshop to play the game with you. I'm going to click here on "Free Transform Path" and then it gets these nice handles. Now, if I go back to Edit, Transform Path, all of a sudden Photoshop goes, so you really didn't want to do something with this path and you go, yes, I did flip horizontal, thank you. There's the other half of a heart. I'm going to click here on the Checkmark to confirm that. With the path selection tool, we're going to drag it across and put it in position. Now, if you hold the Shift key as you do that, it's going to move in a perfectly horizontal direction. If you didn't move the path like I did in the first place. In fact, mine all over the place here, so I need to make sure that these are both in the same position. I'm just going to put them where they're not in the same position. Let's see how we can fix up this problem and make sure that they are aligned perfectly in case you get them off like I did. You're going to select both of these. So select this one, shift, select this one. You've got some alignment options here, so what you can do is to align the vertical centers. When you align the vertical centers, then these two heart shapes are lined up perfectly with each other. Let's have a look at the paths palette because the path palette is showing us exactly what our path looks like. It's just that it isn't two pieces right now. Let's get rid of this guide because that's just in the way. Going back to the path selection tool, I'm going to select both these spaces. Here is an option to combine these shapes, so I'm going to select combined shapes, and once combines shapes is checked, then I'm going to choose merge shape components. That merges these two into a single shapes. Now, if I select over one side, you can say I'm taking the whole heart with me, it's all a single heart shape and that means it's a shape that we can use in Photoshop. Now, having gone to the trouble of making a shape like this, what I suggest you do next is to save it. I'm going to select the shape and we're going to choose Edit, Define Custom Shape. We're going to call this heart and click "OK". Now, provided you don't do something to Photoshop like uninstall it or re-install it over the top or open it without opening your preferences file, this shape is built into Photoshop now, so I'm going to actually get rid of this work path, I'm just going to trash it, so goodbye heart. But here it is. I'm going to the custom shape tool. I've got past selected up here. I open up this panel and the very last custom shape is my heart and I can drag it out. If I drag it out holdings the Shift K, it's constrained to the original proportions that it was in when I draw it. Here we can drag it around. In the last palette, if we want to fill it with something, I can just right-click on the path and choose Fill Path and then I can fill it with the foreground color, for example, which is black and click "OK". It's really a good idea to think about once you create shapes, particularly shapes that you spend a little bit of time creating, that you save them as shapes in Photoshop so that you've got them anytime that you open Photoshop. There's our heart. In the next video, we're going to put on our running shoes a little bit and put together some different shapes that involve some of the features here in this drop-down list, Subtract Front Shape, Intersect, and Exclude. 4. Pt 3 - Lotus Root Shape Using Subtract: The next shape that we're going to draw, I'm going to draw a slice of a lotus plants. In case you didn't know what it looks like, this is the thing that we're going to do. I'm going to add these bigger shapes here and the one in the center. Probably won't worry about the smaller ones, but that's basically what we're looking at. I have a brand new document here. I'm going to size it the size of my work area. This time I'm going to use a different pen tool. I'm going to use the free form Pen tool because lotus plants aren't exactly circular. They're bumpy a bit. I'm going to draw a free form pin tool path. Now I can go back with the direct selection tool onto any of these points. If I don't like how they look, then I can just adjust them. Now I can also remove them. There is a tool here that's the delete anchor point tool. If you don't like an anchor point, you can just click on it to delete it. The nice thing about this particular tool, is that it's not going to break your path in two paces. It's just going to delete that particular point. I'm just going to smooth out my lotus plant here a little bit and we'll get on with adding the other bits to it. Let's call this lotus plant shape and other past palette here, you can say that if we were to save this as a shape, we would just be saving a blob. Let's now go and add some little pieces inside it. For this, I'm actually going to use the Ellipse Tool. This is the ellipse tool here, not the one up here, because this is actually a shape tool, but I'm setting it to path. I'm just going to drag out some ellipses. Once I've dragged them out, I can just reshape them a little bit if I want to using the Direct Selection tool. I'm going to go around here and just add in a few ellipses. They're going to all be different sizes. We're going to need a little bit of work and I want one in the middle as well. I'm just going to work at making those look a little bit better. Whenever I'm turning a shape from a live shape into a regular shape, I'm just clicking Okay, doesn't worry me that we're doing that. Now, if I want to take this shape, for example, and rotate it, going to select it and press Control or Command T to turn the transform handles on. Then I can just move it into position. I'll go back once I've done that with the Direct Selection tool and perhaps adjust one of these or two of these handles just so I get an irregular shape. Now, I'm going to continue doing this and we're going to come back when I've got a better result for my lotus. The thing about losing your live shape ability with the shapes is, just because you're adjusting only one side of them or your rotating them, you will lose that ability, but that's not really of concern to us here. Now, I am using some keyboard shortcuts which can really help you work a bit faster here, I'm using Control or Command T to get up my free transform handles, and pressing the Enter key instead of clicking the Check mark. When I want to switch between the Path Selection tool and the Direct Selection tool, I'm pressing I to get the tool and then Shift +I to switch between the two tools. That just makes it a little bit quicker to be able to select a point on the path and just adjust it. So we're going to call this good for our lotus flower. Let's have a look in the past palette because the problem, is that while it looks okay, it's just going to draw as one big blobby circle if we save a path that looks like this, because we don't have anything that's got cut out holes in it. So I'm going back to the Past Election tool, I'm going to click on one of these circular paths, and I'm going to shift click on all of the others. I'm going to make sure that I don't select this outer shape. Now if I do by mistake, I'm just going to shift click on it to turn it off because I only want these shaped selected and not the outer shape. You can select them more easily by just shift clicking on the middle of them. So I've now got all of these circles selected, but not the outer shape. I also created all of these circles after I created the outer shapes. In terms of layering here, the outer shape was created first thoughts on the bottom of the last stack, all of these others are higher up the last stack, we can't see the stack, but we just know that it's there and we know that these are above it. If we come here to subtract front shape, we should see holes appear inside outer shape. What's happened is that these shapes are now cut out of our lotus flower shape. If we want to force that to be permanent, then having chosen subtract front shape and checked here in the past palette that I passed going to look the way we want it to. Then we're going to go here and choose merge shape components. All that does, is fix this permanently so that this is now a shape that has all those little shapes inside it that are cut out shapes. Now, we're going to the past selection told against, select over the entire shape, go to Edit and define custom shape. Here is our lotus shape. Again, just like any custom shape in Photoshop, this is going to be stored inside Photoshop. We go to the custom shape tool, goes to the very last custom shape is going to be our lotus. We can just drag it out if we hold the Shift key, it's going to be constrained to the proportions that we drew it in. If I go to the Path Selection tool right-click and choose Fill path, I can fill it with the current foreground color, which is black and there is our lotus shape. We've taken the trouble of drawing it, saving it as a custom shape, so it's always accessible to us. For this one, we use the subtract tool to create the shape, but there are some other tools and we're going to look at those now. 5. Pt 4 - Using Exclude and Intersect Shape Operators: For our next shape, we're going to look at using the exclude option. I'm going to start with a rectangle. I'm clicking here on the rectangle tool. I'm going to hold the shift key as I drag out a rectangle. I'm going to move that into the middle of the document. Now I want two of these. With it selected, I'm going to choose edit copy and edit paste. That just duplicates so there's a duplicate right on top of the original. Now, if I press "Control" or "Command T", I get the free transform handles and so I can rotate this. I'm going to hold the shift key as I rotate it so that the rotation is constrained to 45 degrees. This is the shape that I have. If I go to the paths palette, you can see what the shape looks like. Now, with these two shapes selected. If I were to choose combine shape and then merge shape components, this is the overall shape I'll result in creating. Now, that's not what I came here to do. I'm just going to undo that with "Control Alt Z" once. Instead of using the combined shapes, I'm going to use exclude overlapping shapes. What that does is it says that anywhere where these two shapes overlap, in other words, this area in the middle is going to be excluded. All we're getting is these little points out here. You can see it here in the paths palette. Now, having done that, I'm going to bake this into the shape if you like. I'm going to choose merge shape components because I've got to exclude what I'm trying to Photoshop is I like this shape, just make a single shape out of this so that the two shapes won't split away from each other anymore. When I select it, it's all one shape. It's not two shapes any longer. Again, we can create a shape from that edit, define custom shape, just call it shape whatever. If I trash it now because I don't need it any longer, let's go to the layers palette and let's draw out a brand new shape. I'm going to right-click it with the path selection tool selected, and I'm going to fill it with just a foreground color and there is our shape. This one was created using exclude because we wanted to exclude the bits in the middle. For the last shape that we're going to create, we're going to look at the intersect option and we're going to use that to create a gear. I'm going to start here with the polygon tool, and I'm going to set the sides to 12, and I'm going to open this little gear and make sure that I have star selected and indent sides by something like 40 percent. Anywhere between 30 and 50 is going to be just fine here. I'm going to draw out my star shape and let go. Next up, I'm going to draw a circle. I'm going to the ellipse tool here, and I'm going to hold the shift key as I drag out a circle. If you hold down the spacebar as you're drawing the circle, you can't do this after you've finished drawing it but as you're drawing it, you hold down the spacebar you can move your path around. That will help you get an idea as to whether or not you've got a round about the right size. This looks pretty good to me. I'm going to let go of my left mouse button and then let go the shift key. I've got two paths, but those need to be aligned perfectly on top of each other. While they look pretty good, they're probably not exactly perfectly aligned. With the path selection tool here. I've selected both paths going to the alignment options, I'm going to align horizontal centers and vertical centers. I'm not worried that I've lost my live shape properties. That's not a problem here. Now let's look and see what we've got in terms of the shape. We can do that using the paths palette. We really need to keep an eye on the paths palette because this is going to show you what your path really is going to look like. At the moment it's using combined shapes. What we want to do is to use intersect shape because what that does is it just gives us where these two shapes are overlapping, where they are intersecting, and that's going to cut off these pieces that we don't want and give us eventually a gear shape. You can see the gear shape here in the work path. I've selected intersect and having done that and assured myself that I'm getting the shape that I want, I'm now going to bake it into that shape. I'm going to merge the shape components, and that just lops off the bits that I didn't need and gives me this shape as a result. This is my gear shape and I can go ahead and do other things with it. For example, I may want to cut out the middle of it. I'm just going to draw a small circle in the middle of this gear. I'm going to use the path selection tool to make sure that both these shapes are centered nicely. Go to the path and just have a look and see what we're getting, is the middle being cut out. The answer to that is clearly yes. Subtract front shape is working perfectly here. But of course I need to bake that into my shape. I'm going to choose merge shape components. That's just going to bake it in so this is now a single shape not a gear shape and a hole in the middle. Now that I've done that, I can just go ahead and save that as a shape. I'm going to get rid of my work path and go and draw with my brand new shape. Hold the shift key to constrain it to a regular shape. Right-click with the path selection tool selected and I can just fill it with the foreground color. There is my gear shape. You can say that it's relatively easy using path to create quite complex shapes in Photoshop. Your project for this class is to go ahead and create the shapes that I've created in this class or the shapes that you want to design which take advantage of the Boolean operators. These adding, subtracting, excluding, and intersect operators that you can apply to pass in Photoshop. When you're done with your shapes, create a document and just place a illustration of each of your shapes in the document and post that as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about working with the pen tool and creating custom shapes in Photoshop using the operators that are available for working with shapes. If you did enjoy the class and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to find my classes and to determine if they too will find them useful. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments. I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon. 6. Extra video Cat's eye: This is an add-on video for the Photoshop Shapes class. One of my students was having a little bit of difficulty drawing a cat's eye and I thought that this was a good extension exercise to have a look at. I'm going to the Pen Tool and making sure that I'm working on a path. From the drop-down list here, I have path selected and I'm going to draw out the outside edge of the cat's eye. I'll hold Alt or Option to swing the handle around here as I draw and I'm going back to my starting point now, when I click here, I'm going to lose that shape that I had, but I'm not really too much worried about that. I'm going to the direct selection tool, I'm just going to select over this and then hold Alt or Option just to swing this around. This is the starting point for my cat's eye, and I can just work on it until I get it the shape that I want. Having done that, I'm going to the Path Selection Tool so I can take the whole of this path. I'm selecting it and I'll choose edit copy, edit paste and that gives me a second copy on top of the first, I'll choose Edit Free Transform path. I'm going to make this path just a bit bigger. I'm holding the Shift and the Alt key, that's Option and Shift on a Mac so I can just drag this out to be a larger size and I'll click the check mark. At this point, if I wanted to make changes to the shape, I would do so. Having made those changes, if necessary, I'm going to select over both paths with the path selection tool. I'm going up here and I'm going to choose Exclude Overlapping Shapes. I'm looking here in the path panel to make sure that my work path looks the way I want it to look. In this case, although it's a little bit difficult to say, what we're going to get is a path where this area here between these two paths is going to be filled with color and that's going to be the first part of our cat's eye. If we're happy with the look of our work path here, we're just going to set it in concrete, so we're going to select Merge Shape Components. That's the first step. Now I'm going to the Ellipse tool. I'm going to select it. I'm going to make sure that I have path selected here. I'm going two draw out an ellipse for the cat's eye. If it's not in the right position, I can hold down the Space bar as I'm drawing it, to put it in the correct position and continue to draw it. Now, I'm happy with that so I'm going back to the path selection tool, I'm going to select over all of these shapes to go back to the path palette. The path palette is going to tell me what the shape is going to look like. When I draw the shape, this area is going to be filled with color and so too will a pupil. It's looking at exactly as I want it to look. I'm going to click here. It's set at the moment to combine shapes and because that's looking just fine, I'm just going to click Merge Shape Components. I'll click Yes and this is my shape. Let's go and select over this path and make it a shape, edit, define custom shape and this is going to be cool cat eye. Click Okay. Now I can get rid of my work path. Let's go back to my document here. Let's go back to the custom shape tool. Let's make sure that I'm working on a color that I can use and down the very end of my shapes panel is my cat eye. I'm going to set this to shape for arguments sake or fill pixels. I'm just going to draw out my shape so we can see what it looks like. Well, it's probably not the world's best cat eye, but that's how you create a shape that looks like this. You need to think in terms of this line around the edge of the eye actually being a shape so it has an outer path and an inner path and that's the way that you can create a shape that looks and behaves like this.