No Drawing Necessary: Custom Shapes in Photoshop

Learn how to communicate visual concepts without drawing so much as a stick figure. Start saving time with Photoshop, which ships with hundreds of pre-drawn custom shapes.

How Not to Draw: Introduction

• Art without drawing

1. Photoshop Vector Shapes

• Introducing the Shapes panel
• Using the Custom Shape tool
• Combining custom shapes
• Defining your own custom shape
• Loading several hundred custom shapes

2. Moving Shapes into Illustrator

• Copying and pasting a custom shape
• Troubleshooting a dimmed Paste command
• Pasting multiple custom shapes

3. Simplifying Custom Shapes

• Using the Simplify command
• Advanced simplification
• Reshaping a custom path outline

4. Create Your Own with Image Trace

• Preparing a photographic image
• Placing and tracing the image
• Expanding an image tracing
• Adding your custom shape to a piece of art

Class Dismissed

• Now away with you!