1. Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Hello, my name is Tyler and I'll be your instructor for this course. I've been in the industry for over 14 years now, and I've had the pleasure of working with companies such as Disney Publishing, WMS Games, the Marketing Store, Sock Puppet Studios, and many others. In that time, I've realized that time is of the essence for every illustrator and artist. And so what I did was create a technique that allows us to digitally ink in Photoshop and save tons of time while allowing us to create crisp clean art that can be used for various purposes. The goal is to get you acclimated in Photoshop very quickly, show you the tools, and allow you to use them in whatever way you think would be best to beef up your portfolio. Once you get the hang of the techniques and the tools you'll be able to add one other arrow to your quiver and you'll become a much faster artist, which will allow you to do more work in a much shorter time period. We're gonna talk about the pen tool. We're gonna talk about paths. We're also gonna talk about the action tools. And we're gonna combine some techniques to help you mimic some of the industry standards for artists who use pens and paper, but also allowing you to pick up another tool in Photoshop. That's pretty helpful. I'll be the first to admit I spent most of my career running from the Pen tool. But after figuring out this workflow, it's become my best friend. So hopefully you guys who don't use it very often will fall in love with the Pen tool also. Now one thing to remember. Your project doesn't have to end up like my project. As long as you can grasp the techniques and use them properly you're good to go. So let's go ahead. Let's get started and let's have some fun

2. Setting Up Adobe Photoshop for a Smooth Workload

2.1 The Digital Canvas

Okay, before we get started, there are a few things that we need to know in order to navigate through this course successfully. I'm gonna talk about the Pen Tools, how to access the Pen Tools. We're also gonna talk about how to access the Actions panel, and the Paths panel. So, let's go ahead and get started. So let's make sure everybody knows all of the shortcuts and where these actions, and paths, and additional steps can be found in Photoshop. So the first thing I do is go to the Window tab and you see that Action is there. And you can turn that on by hitting Alt+F9 or you can just come to Windows > Action. And Path is right below. It's right here, that's where your paths are. Those are the two palettes you're gonna need today. By following this course, those are gonna be the two main palettes. If you're not familiar with them, make sure you know how to access them. So I have them open on the right-hand side now, that's my path palette. And the one above is my action palette, all right? So we're gonna be using it quite a bit along with the Pen Tool. So your Pen Tool can be found right here. You can also hit the shortcut p for pen. We're gonna use the basic Pen Tool and you're either gonna have a path or shape. Now, primarily throughout the tutorial, we're gonna be using the path, but every now and then, we'll go to the shapes. So now you know how to access both. Primarily, we're gonna be using path. So you see path and shapes, there we go. All right and there's a second Pen Tool, which is a free-form pen tool. And that'll be the alternative to just using the regular Pen Tool. So we'll use the free-form Pen Tool and the regular Pen Tool throughout the tutorial. And so when we click once, we click again, what you wanna do is hold the button down in order to control your tangents or anchor points. So when you first click, you take your finger off the mouse or your pen of the Wacom. And then you click again. And so right now, I'm still in my shape mode. I have my fill on only. And so we get a fill, we get a fill of color that looks like this. All right. So that's what the shape mode looks like. Now if I click the palette here, you can see that is what the path looks like. So if I select that and delete, that's how I get rid of the path. Let's go to just the basic path here. And I click, click again, and then I pull the tangent, I hold down. And now the tangent, or the anchor points, whichever term you use is fine. I can then control the shape or the direction of my Pen Tool. So wherever that tangent is pointing, the first one is the direction that the next click is going to follow. And I can use the previous anchor tangent to control the path. So when I say path, it's just that line right there. That's what I'm referring to. And I can hold Ctrl down to move the original click or the anchor point. If we hold Ctrl down, and to move the tangents, I just hold Alt. All right, so these are the steps that we are going to need as we move forward. So make sure you have a strong grasp of how to use the Pen Tool and the anchor points. Once you have it down, go ahead and move forward to the next lesson.