Photoshop® Elements 6 for Dummies®

Chapter 12. Drawing and Painting

In This Chapter

• Choosing colors

• Drawing with the Elements Pencil tool

• Painting with the Elements Brush tool

• Filling and outlining your selections

• Pouring color with the Paint Bucket

• Creating gradients and patterns

• Creating and editing shapes of all sorts

Elements is such a deluxe, full-service image editing program that it doesn't just stop at giving you tools to select, repair, organize, and share your images. It figures that you may need to add a swash of color, either freeform with a brush or pencil or in the form of a geometric or organic shape. Don't worry: This drawing and painting business isn't just for those with innate artistic talent. In fact, Elements gives you plenty of preset brushes and shapes that you can use. If you can pick a tool and drag your mouse, you can draw and paint.

Choosing Color

Before you start drawing or painting, you may want to change your color to something other than the default black. If you've read the earlier chapters in this book, we're sure that you checked out the Elements Tools panel and noticed the two overlapping color swatches at the bottom of the panel. These two swatches represent two categories of color: foreground and background. Here's a quick look at how they work with different tools:

• When you add type, paint with the Brush tool, or create a shape, you're using the foreground color.

• On the background layer of ...