Top Tip Tuesday – Dotted Line

I’m never sure what to write about here, I’ve always maintained that I’m in no way a trainer but I do like to pass on the little snippets of goodness that I’ve picked up from the hours of tutorials and podcasts. Recently someone mentioned on twitter that Photoshop could do everything except dotted lines. Not quite true – here’s how it can:

Everything we need is in the brushes palette, first let’s choose the brush we want, in my case I’m choosing a small round brush.

Next let’s move the Spacing slider to the right

Now we can use it like any other brush

But, let’s just say that we don’t want a dotted line, we want a dashed line. Well, first let’s make the brush;

On a clear layer with a white background have black as your foreground colour.

Now design the brush you want to use and put a marquee around it.

From the Edit menu choose Define Brush Preset. (You may neeed to choose to Show All Menu Items)

Now from the brush presets choose your new brush and open up the brush pallete again. Once again increase the spacing. Now this is ok but if I was tracing my route again on a map as above it won’t look right

The reason for this is that the brush is maintaining it’s horizontal and vertical position. What we’d like is for it to follow the curve of the route. That’s easily sorted.

All I have to do is choose the Direction option under Angle Jitter in the Shape Dynamics.

Now when I use the brush it all looks much nicer;

An awesome use of this is demonstrated by the great Burt Monroy in his podcast PixelPerfect. While making an illustration of a cowboy boot he uses the above technique for the stitching.

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