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Painting with Brush and Pencil Tools (Continued)

5. It can be difficult to control the brush stroke, but you can use the Shift key to apply a stroke as if you’re creating a dot-to-dot picture: Click where you want the stroke to begin, then press and hold the Shift key. With the Shift key held down, click at each point where you want the stroke to curve. Although the Shift key constrains the brush stroke to a straight line, clicking along the path of a curve creates the appearance of an overall curve. The more times you click along the curve, the gentler the curve will appear:

6. To create a horizontal or perpendicular line, hold down the Shift key while dragging:

You can continue to trace using these same simple methods. A quick way to change the brush while you’re tracing is to right-click (or Control-click for Mac users). This opens the brush presets:

Make the changes and then press Enter to close the palette.

You can also use the keyboard to change the brush diameter: the left bracket ([) decreases the size of the brush, and the right bracket (]) increases the size. To quickly change the opacity using the keyboard, type a percentage in two numbers. For example, typing 50 changes the opacity to 50%, and typing 05 changes the opacity to 5%.

7. Once you’ve finished tracing the lines of your image, you can use the Brush tool to color the different areas; this is when the brush Mode comes in handy. For example, by selecting Behind from the Mode menu on the Options bar, you can paint “behind” existing strokes, so the color only appears in transparent areas. This setting helps you to “stay within the lines” when you paint:

Tip:

To make our drawing easier to work with, we duplicated the background layer and then hid it using the Layers palette. We then set the duplicate background layer to 70% opacity (also using the Layers palette). You have to either create a duplicate background and hide or delete the original background layer, or promote the background layer to a floating layer in order to edit the layer’s properties, since the background layer cannot be unlocked. For more information on layers, see the section Working with Layers.

8. Click on the foreground color box in the Color palette, and then click on an area of your image to sample the color. Using the Brush tool in Behind mode, continue to paint in areas of the image, from dark to light:

You can experiment with other brush modes to refine your painting. For example, Darken is similar to Behind, but it paints a color onto the image only where the existing colors you’re painting on are lighter than the foreground color you’re painting with. Lighten is the opposite; it paints a color only onto areas that are darker than the color you’re painting with.

For example, if we wanted to add more highlights to the image above, we could choose the highlight color we want to use, then set the brush option to the Lighten mode. Only darker areas of the image would be lightened with the color, and colors that are lighter than our new color, like the round area in the upper-right corner of our image, would be left unchanged: