Methods To Make Basic Shapes

This tutorial will help you out with making all different types of shapes. There are three basic ways you can make shapes. These are very easy to do once you learn how to do them.

Method 1: Marquee Tools.
The Marquee Tools can be used to make basic filled-in shapes or the outline of a shape. These are located at the top of the tools pallete. There are 4 different types of the marquee tool, as shown below:


To use these tools, simply click on the icon in the tools palette that looks like one of the above tools. From there, click on an image (if you want to start a new image, go to File--> New and choose your desired settings) and drag the marquee across the area where you want the shape to be. When you let go of the click, an area should be selected. To make a solid shape, get the paint bucket tool (G), choose your desired colour and click inside the selection. An easier way to do this is to set the background colour (shown in the picture below) to the colour you want and press ctrl+backspace with your selection still active. If you wanted to, instead of using the paint bucket tool to fill the selection you could use the gradient fill tool which is with the paint bucket tool to fill in your selection with a nice gradient.


'A' is the foreground colour and 'B' is the background colour.
With the marquee tool, you also have the ability to easily create an outline of your selection. Instead of filling the selection, go to Edit--> Stroke. In the box that pops up, choose your width, colour, set the location of it to center and leave the rest at defaults.

Method 2: Lasso Tools
These are located just below the Marquee tools on the tools pallete. There are 3 different types of them, and they are able to do the same things as the marquee tools.


If you follow the same instructions as the marquee tools for filling and outlining, you should be able to do it easily.

Method 3: Various Shape Tools
These are located on the 9th row from the top on the tools pallete on the right of the tools pallete. These tools are useful if you want a rounded rectangle or some custom shapes. There are 6 of them, shown below.


One of the great things about these tools is that they are made with paths, thus making them easily modifiable. The two most useful tools in this set would be the rounded rectangle tool and the custom shape tool. These are particularly useful because they cannot be created using the previous techniques. Well, you could make them with the other tools, but that would be making it hard on yourself. So, to test these tools out, select the rounded rectagle tool and on the bar at the top of the page, match the settings up with the ones on the image below (click for full size).


Click and drag across your image (File--> New if you don't already have an image open) to create the shape. That was simple, wasn't it? If you want to play around with the image, get the pen tool (P) and have fiddle around. To drag points, you need to hold the ctrl button while clicking and dragging, and to add an anchor point, click on the existing lines. To delete an anchor point, click on an existing anchor point. This is a little advanced if you are a beginner, so I won't go any further.

There are a few other ways of creating shapes, such as drawing them with the pencil tool or the brush tool, though I don't think that needs a tutorial to learn. All you need to know is to press and hold shift while drawing to make straight lines. The other way you can create shapes is to use the pen tool and paths, but that is a bit advanced so I will make a tutorial on that another time :)

Using Method 1

Using Method 2

Using Method 3