From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced

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Drawing with shape outlines

Drawing with shape outlines - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced

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Drawing with shape outlines

In this exercise, we're going to draw this swash, which is currently represented as a pixel-based layer, we're going to draw it using a series of vector-based shapes. These are simple shapes by the way. We can create this entire swash effect using nothing more than two ellipses and two rectangles. That's all it takes. And not only is it a good experience for you to learn how the Shape tools work, but you can scale it to any size you like, and it will always be razor-sharp, as opposed to a pixel-based layer, which is going to soften as you up sample it. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and zoom out from my composition quite a bit, because we're going to have to start things off with a very big shape indeed. I want you to click on the underline layer. The only reason it's there, by the way, is so that we have something to trace. I actually created this underline layer using the Shape tools and then ultimately converted it to pixels. All right, so step one: let's go ahead and grab…

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