Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Drawing with Shapes

Wow, so many brush options and Adobe still isn't done—there's yet another way to draw things in Elements. The program includes the Shape tool (which is actually a group of tools that share one slot in the Tools panel), which lets you draw geometrically perfect shapes, regardless of your artistic ability. And not just simple shapes like circles and rectangles: You can draw animals, plants, starbursts, picture frames—all sorts of things, as shown in Figure 12-23. This tool should appeal to anyone whose grade-school masterpieces always got put up on the wall behind the piano somewhere.

Figure 12-23. Here are just a few of the shapes that you can draw with Elements, even if you flunked elementary school art class. These objects look even more impressive once you gussy them up with Layer styles (Adding Layer Styles).

Turning yourself into an artist by using Elements' Shape tool is easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Open an image or create a new one.

   You can add shapes to any file you can open in Elements.

2. Activate the Shape tool.

   Click the Shape tool in the Tools panel or press U. The Shape tool is sometimes a little confusing to newcomers to Elements, because its icon reflects the shape that's currently active—so you may see a rectangle, a polygon, or a line, for instance. (You see a blue rectangle before you've used this tool for the first time.)

3. Select the shape you want to ...