Technical data

48 Working with Paint and Text
Using the basic Paintbrush tool
The Paintbrush tool is used for freehand drawing. Successful
freehand drawing requires practice and a steady hand! You might find it
easier if you use a graphics tablet, rather than a mouse.
To paint a line using the Paintbrush tool, select it from the Tools
toolbar. When you move the Paintbrush tool over the image the cursor
will change into a paintbrush.
q Select “Background” on the Layer Manager tab, so you will start
out painting on the bottom layer.
q Choose the Paintbrush tool. Left-click and drag to draw a freehand
line. Then draw some more lines.
q If you don’t like what you drew, press Ctrl+Z to undo (but
remember, this is all experimental—the more paint you get on the
screen, the better!).
q Your lines appear in the currently selected foreground color. To
paint with the background color, click the arrow on the Color tab to
switch the two colors. Now might be a good time to try various
techniques for selecting different foreground and background
colors, as described earlier in the chapter.
Choosing and customizing brush tips
All of the paint tools work in conjunction with the Brush Tip and/or
Tool Properties tabs, so let’s see how they work with the basic
Paintbrush tool.
Brush Tips determine the basic size and shape of the mark the brush
tools make on-screen. The lines you’ve drawn so far with the
Paintbrush tool may be thick or thin, depending which brush is
currently selected.
q Display the Brush tip tab and note which tip is selected. Click a
different one. To draw a “pencil” line, choose a single-pixel brush.