Discover & Manage Basic Shapes

There are a few different methods through which you can make shapes. Create a new blank layer by clicking on the new layer icon as shown.

Make sure that you are on the ‘fill pixels’ option for this method.

This will allow the shape to 'fill' onto the new layer.  Now go to the shapes toolbar as shown and choose the Rectangle tool.

Now choose a foreground color from the swatches palette (or your preferred method). I’m choosing a dark blue. This will be the ‘fill’ color.

Now simply click and drag to create your rectangular shape.

Go ahead and choose another foreground color such as yellow.

Drag the rectangle shape tool in a different direction. Now the shape will fill with yellow.

Look in the layers palette and notice that these two separate ‘shapes’ are actually on the same layer. This is another important concept for you to remember. So if you want to create lots of shapes and have them all on one layer you can do that and it will save you lots of extraneous cluttered layers in the layers palette. To keep the shapes separate though with the fill method, you’ll want to create a new layer before you create each fill shape.

Some more basic image editing; you can make a selection of one of these easily with the magic wand tool (which will select the entire shape on any tolerance) and then you can edit: cut to get rid of it.   Now because you had overlapped these ‘shapes’ on the same layer when you cut the yellow layer, there will be a chunk missing out of the blue layer.   If you had these on separate layers (or shape layers) they would remain independent.

Now create a new layer (it’s important for you to understand all of these concepts: crawl-walk-run).

On this new layer you can fill another shape and as long as you don’t add any other fills/shapes onto that layer then you can move it around independently. Try the ellipse tool with a new foreground color.

You can easily spice these basic shapes up a bit by adding some layer effects aka layer styles. Right click and choose blending options and in the dialog box you will see plenty of options for you. Click on Bevel and Emboss to add a default bevel to the shape fill layer.

You an easily duplicate layer effects by dragging them to the bottom of another layer.

Another option which doesn’t require as much thought or foreplanning is using the shapes layer command at the top of the options bar on the left.

Every time you click and move your mouse a new and independent shape layer will appear on the document and in the layers palette (for whichever shape you have selected). Try this out.

You can choose different shapes from the drop down menu and use the fly out menu to append and add all kinds of custom shapes to choose from.

Choose a new foreground color.

Click and drag with a new shape of your choice. 

Here you can see the leaf/flower shape layer in the layers palette.

It is a vector based shape with it’s own property as a layer in the layers palette which means that you can treat it for the most part as a regular layer and add effects, change fill/opacity, etc.

In the Basic Photoshop dvd training I go through several tutorials on vector / shape creation and management.

If the background layer is too boring for you, select it in the layers palette by clicking on the layer that you want to fill with a gradient.  You could also do a gradient fill adjustment layer (taught in my dvd series).

Now that it is the ‘active’ layer, grab your gradient tool.

Choose a gradient of your choice from the drop down menu in the options bar.

Now simply swipe across at any angle like this diagonal. You can hold down the shift key to get a perfect 45 or 90 degree angle.

Note that the gradient is being applied on this layer below the other layers (because of the order in the layers palette).

It’s easier just to create shape layers nice and fast than the fill pixel or path method. You’ll often end up with lots of these pretty quickly (each as their own independent layer).

To help organize them, just create a layer set. Click on the folder icon at the bottom of the layers palette.

Now just drag the layers into the layer set for organization.

Layer sets are described in more detail as well as a huge chunk of time devoted to vector creator, layer management (and everything) in my video tutorials training.