Tech Lines/Brushes

1. Create new document in Photoshop (mine is 300x300),

2. The first kind of tech line I will demonstrate is the 1px tech line, or otherwise known as the pencil tech line. Select your pencil tool, and black as your foreground color:

3. And set it up like this:

4. This way of making tech lines generally takes more time and concentration, but it often produces better results. When making brushes, keep the following in mind:

• Always draw lines in angles that are in increments of 45 degrees
• Holding the shift key while drawing a line will keep it at a straight angle
• Make sure your tech lines are black, you can change them once they are brushes
• Zooming in will help you make better tech lines

5. Ok, lets first start by learning how to make some tech text lines. These are tech lines meant to look like very small text and is very nice looking over lots of different artworks. Make a point somewhere on your image and begin dragging a line to the right:

5. Now, lets zoom in to get a better look for what we are doing. Select the zoom tool from the toolbar, and drag a box around the tech line you just made (not a perfect box, just an area about a cm wide around it:

6. Now, draw some smaller lines underneath this one:

7. Zoom back out to 100% (Ctrl + -), and your tech line should look something like this:

8. Hopefully you can get more creative with yours than I have and make something better. Now, lets discuss polygon tech lines/brushes. For these, your main tool is going to be your polygon lasso tool:

9. Basically, this selection tool will let us make diagonal and straight lines very easily. Click where you want to begin your selection, and hold shift. Now begin dragging up, down, left, right, and at 45 degree diagonal lines. Click to make another point and create another line. In general, you always want to stay within 45 degrees of your previous line. Keep making points until you come back to the start, to close it up, just click around the beginning point.

10. Make a new layer, and fill this selection with black: Deselect it (Ctrl + D)

11. Go back with your polygon selection tool, and make some selections going inside of this larger tech line. Then cut it out (Ctrl + x). This will give some neat effects to your tech lines:

And that's about it! There are lots of other techniques that you will learn and figure out as you go. With the pencil tool, try making more complex and detailed brushes with corners, boxes, triangles, and other designs. You will find that these may be much easier than you first imagined!