Stroke That Puppy!

My biggest hurdle with Photoshop was in going from drawing with pencil and paper to drawing with a mouse and a monitor. This was hard enough, but trying to achieve the same natural pen strokes as when inking a drawing by hand was even tougher. I've been told this task would be a lot easier if I owned a Wacom tablet, but until one of those drops out of the sky I have found another method which works almost as well (at least for me anyway).

I've read countless articles and tutorials on stroking with the pen tool in Photoshop, but none of these really worked to my satisfaction. A friend even suggested that I create my own brushes in Illustrator, but that wasn't the best solution, either. What I finally figured out was a method utilizing the simulate pressure option in Photoshop's Stroke Path dialogue box. Now this was a method I just sort of stumbled upon, because neither the Adobe User Guide nor their online help explains "simulate pressure" or what it does.

Ah, my old friend, the Pencil. Now in Illustrator the Pencil Tool can be used to draw, unlike Photoshop's Pencil which is really just a paint brush. Drawing with the Pencil in Illustrator creates a vector path which can be easily edited. You can also double-click the Pencil in the toolbar and tweak the settings further in the option box that appears. To illustrate this I'm using the puppy I drew for one of my old sidebar content boxes. I started by drawing the puppy with Illustrator's Pencil Tool and then I copied those paths and pasted them into a Photoshop document.

Now, if you're like me, and you've tried pasting a path from Illustrator into Photoshop and found that for some bizarro reason it just keeps pasting the image as pixels (instead of pasting it as a path) do not fret. The solution (which came after weeks of tedious research and several bottles of Excedrin) is actually quite simple. In the file menu of Illustrator go to Edit > Preferences > File Handling & Clipboard and in the Clipboard on Quit section check both AICB and Preserve Paths.

Now that we have that taken care of you can copy paths from Illustrator and paste them into Photoshop till your hearts content. And here is my pasted puppy paths ...

Next I selected a brush size (for this drawing I am using a 9px hard round for the bigger lines and a 3px hard round for the smaller ones), and then I grabbed the Path Selection Tool (black arrow). Right-click on the path and from the flyout menu choose Stroke Path. A little dialogue box will appear. Make sure the "Brush" is selected and that the simulate pressure checkbox is ticked.

When you do this Photoshop simulates the pressure as if you were drawing such a line yourself by hand. I then created layers for the different lines so I could go back later and erase any overlap.

If for some reason the simulate pressure option isn't working correctly for you then there are a couple things you need to check for. First, go to the brush options bar, open your brush panel, and select Reset Brushes (as shown below)...

Sometimes resetting the brushes will fix whatever hiccup Photoshop is having. Also, make sure that Shape Dynamics is checked in your brush palette options...

And while you have the shape dynamics screen open, make sure "Pen Pressure" is selected in the control drop down menu...

As you can see the simulate pressure option doesn't do a half bad job of simulating actual hand drawn pen strokes...

Once this was done I merged everything and reduced it by 50% for the sidebar - Look, honey, I shrunk the puppy!

Now he just needs to be toilet trained.

If you would like to try this yourself you can download my Puppy PSD file here which includes the drawing of the puppy and all the paths I made to create him. Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to practice stroking the paths with the pen tool as I described above.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to your comments.

Have fun!