Skip to main content

Custom Shapes with Polygon Tool

Lesson 6 from: Layering in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers

Traci Reed

Custom Shapes with Polygon Tool

Lesson 6 from: Layering in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers

Traci Reed

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2000+ more >

Lesson Info

6. Custom Shapes with Polygon Tool

Lesson Info

Custom Shapes with Polygon Tool

Who still loves hexagons? Another awesome boy thing I think that there was some pushback because there was so much girl stuff going on that there was a lot of geometric shapes recently the pushback against for the boys so this is fine a layout of my crazy child but you can see that we have hexagons in the background now does anybody know how to make tax guns? Okay, so there's two ways there's actually a hexagon shaped in your custom shaped tool but I don't like using it I like to use the polygon tool now the polygon tool is really cool because you could make hexagons if you put them with six sides but you can also make any any number you want you to make pentagon's you could make triangles anything that you can imagine how ever many sides even also make stars. So if we have five points and we click star it'll make a star so you see really and you can also control the size of your star how pointy it is. If you were to drop this indent down to forty percent, it would be a lot a lot less ...

indented star and then you can also smooth the corners to get a rounded star. There are so many options with following on tool it's amazing you can also smoothie indents which I don't normally dio but we'll see that option it kind of gives a curve instead of a solid indent on the inside so let's go backto hexagons six sides we don't want it to be smooth in any way or a star and so you can see in this layout there are so many hexagons and this can get my numbing trying to make that these all align perfectly so what we want to d'oh is we want to start with one hex akon and when you draw it a hex on texting until generally isn't going to come out straight I've noticed that with the ex con tool so what I like to dio so just draw it and then I'll rotate it with my grid on and you can see it will snap to the grid and straighten up the's hexagons are the other way though so let's rotate it ninety degrees and now we can build our hexagons so we have one two, three, four, five six seven eight nine, ten, eleven in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven twelve or so if we were to try and make these perfect by clicking and dragging every time it would be really difficult to make all of them lined up perfectly you can hold down shift and kind of get some someone's of perfection but we're having issues and there's a lot easier way to do it anyway um what you would dio is you would create all twelve hexagons just duplicating layers so we're gonna duplicated eleven times one, two, three, four five six seven eight nine ten eleven so now we have twelve x a guns and you want to make sure that the first text adan is where you want the very bottom hexen on to be so we're gonna put it right here and then the last text gone is the very top hexter gone so we're gonna put it right here and now you can come in and select all of these mexicans and um you would distribute the vertical centers again now that's still not what we want that's kind of crazy but we can come in and let every other one but we don't have the right number of mexicans but that's okay, we'll just drag and dragged them all together right across quick and easy depends on how you like your spacing these the verde vertically don't have a lot of space so I would want them horizontally did not have a lot of space either creative thing I have done that individually yeah yeah save me about an hour right now yes and now you know that they'll be perfect tio yeah I'm gonna be messed up so now that we have them where we want them to be, we can go in, move them so that they're perfect move them over here, and if you hit command shift and the left bracket, so go all the way to the bottom, but we don't want him all the way the bottom, but it's easier to move them all the way to the bottom, and then just move them up twice, and now they're underneath everything. And so, if you notice on the text, adan lay out their double hexagons, and all of the hexagons in the background have the same paper and there's a really easy way to do that. You don't have to drag the same paper, and twelve times or eleven times, yes, so what we want to do first is we want to duplicate the hexagon, and we want to resize it. Now you can do a percentage wise to make it easier on yourself, so let's do all of them ninety percent. So the problem with this is to make sure he changed color so we can see them. The problem with this is you can't transform again, like we did yesterday, because even though you only transformed it by ninety percent, when you transform again, it will move your hexen on, because the center of rotation is where it transforms from, and the center of rotation was originally this center of the sex gone, so if you try and do it up here at the top it's really going to move that far down so we have to go in, and we have tio resize them all individually ninety percent, which can be kind of tedious if you, um, did this beforehand, like it feels like you should duplicate them for so that you're duplicating them all together. But if you try tio do the alignment and distribute with all of these text guns, it will they will use all of them together to distribute, and that won't work. So you do have to go in here and transform them all one at a time, so that can be tedious, but I'm going to save you time in a few minutes, her in a few seconds when when we get to the next part. So ninety every time I do this started the wrong one, zero, ninety, ok, so let's, just imagine that we did them all because you don't have to go through and do them all changes colors we could see better. So now what you want to d'oh is I'm going to turn these off so that it's easier to tell which ones are, which you'll want to go through and select all of these together. And just like we did with the chevrons, make sure you hold down shift while you're selecting and just like we did with the chevron's there's gonna be one behind him now you can hold down shift if you can't you can't see this hexagon behind his head, but if you hold downshift and right click instead of left click you can choose the polygon instead of the layer that's on top, so we're going to right click to choose the polygon and then left click to picket so now it's part of all of those layers and then command e or control lee to merge and so now they're all still individual polygons that you can add it separately if you need to but they're one layer so I can turn them off now there are all merged together, but they're going to be on top of all of your secondary polygon so you want to move them down to the bottom again and now when you drag in a paper you khun just clip one paper well, just quit this paper you can clip one paper and it will clip to all of the shapes together then you turn these back on he even clip all of your individual papers to every single polygon and it took longer for me to demonstrate that it actually takes in real life so it's super fast and look at all that beautiful pattern. You get to incorporate, and it doesn't overwhelm. It doesn't. If you incorporated all those patterns in a way that they were more out there and more like if they were on the other side of the layout, it would probably overwhelming distract from the pictures. But because they're under the pictures, and they're leading your eye right to the picture, it becomes a really beautiful design element instead. And this picture and the story is crazy anyway. So we can have a little bit more pattern and have a little bit more fun.

Class Materials

bonus material

Shadow Styles
Stitching Brushes
Stitching Styles

Ratings and Reviews

Corrina
 

I have recently discovered digital scrapbooking and have been using a great scrapbooking software that I downloaded on-line. There are limitations with the software that prompted me to look deeper for ideas. Traci's course was fantastic! I learned so much from her not only in scrapbooking layouts and using different elements in a page but my level of understanding of photoshop has improved dramatically. The presentation was easy to follow and broken into perfect chunks to go back and review the techniques. Thank you so much Traci for presenting this awesome course. I will look for more of your courses. Your scrapbooking is beautiful and inspiring!

ChristyWhitehead
 

I'm a photographer. I do a lot of graphic design for my business. I feel like I'm fairly knowledgeable. I saw this class being shown for free on Creative Live one day and it wasn't my first choice to watch, but was the best out of the list... I was wrong. This is a great class. I didn't expect to learn that much and I've been learning a lot! Great info!

LourdesM
 

This course was amazing. I learn some things I didn't know how to do. Traci is simple and straight forward in her teaching. Very easy to understand.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES