Basic Bezier Tut for Paintshop Pro

This tutorial is for Paintshop Pro but I believe the principles can be applied to Photoshop, Illustrator or CorelDraw as well. I am using PSP X. For the sake of this tut I am using a 600X600 px graphic. If you want to make a border for a 12X12” scrapbook page, you should make it larger than 12”, possibly 3650px. First of all, let’s get familiar with the pen tool and the menus associated with it.

  Take a look at your tool palette (above, left). Select the pen tool icon. You should see a preset menu open up near the toolbar at the top. Get familiar with these tools. I’ve labeled the tools below. To draw a Bezier, we use the Bezier tool (above middle, red arrow). Now take a look at this screenshot of the preset flyout menu (below)
     

Make sure you match your settings like mine, i.e., have antialias checked, connect segments, and show nodes. Line style and width is up to you. Set your top color, which is also the outline color, for whatever color you want. I made it red so it is easy to see. Set your background or fill color to null. (top right) Sorry about all the screenshots. I just want to make sure we are on the same page. Below is the continuation of the pentool preset flyout menu.

  Let’s begin. Open up a new file 600X600px in PSP. Fill it with a white background. If you added a fill to the background well, make sure you set it back to null again. Select the color for your line (foreground) color. Select the  pen tool in your tool palette and the Bezier tool from the top menu.
  Start drawing a line with your pentool on the left hand side of the canvas. Just draw a small line from left to right, angling it towards the top.
Note: By "draw" I mean just click once and drag upwards and release the mouse button.

Start drawing again where you want it to curve. You can see that as you draw, it not only draws the line, but it also draws nodes and little arrows (handles) so you can edit them and rotate them and manipulate the curve(s) easily. It’s so much easier to do it than to explain it. Once you have the hang of it, it’s easy.

 
  If you want to start a fresh new line, you will need to deselect the one you’re drawing by pressing Ctrl+D. Otherwise it will just continue to connect to the line you started with. Once you’ve drawn the Bezier, you will need to edit it. Click on the edit mode icon in the preset menu. (see below) As mentioned before, we want the bezier curve to be larger than what you really need it for. You can stretch the curve by pulling the nodes to the left and to the right. It is also much easier with a Wacom tablet. I highly recommend it!
  Once you’re in edit mode, you can click on the node at a curve, and then turn the handles to manipulate the curves. If you right-click on a node, another menu will pop out which gives you more control with editing. I will not go into that now, but go ahead and experiment with it.

Also, if you accidentally deselect the curve and are totally lost lol, then go to your layers menu, and expand the vector layer and find the layer you’re working on. You’ll be able to tell that you’re on that layer because the layer name will be bold. (see below)
 
 

If you double-click on that layer another menu will pop up so you can change the line and fill colors and thicknesses:

 
  Furthermore, you can right-click on a node and a different fly-out menu will pop up for other editing features.
 
  If you click on "Edit" from that menu, for example, there are even more options for editing if you right-click on a node.
The following menu will pop up:
 

You can delete nodes this way and as you can see lot of other options are there as well. I will not get into this at this time, but experiment with it as well.

Once you are satisfied with your Bezier, you can convert it to a raster file. I closed mine up by adding lines and filling it with black. I can then use this as a template later on to create a border. You can also rotate it so it’s vertical instead of horizontal.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to write me at oilnwine@gmail.com