Vector Graphic Drawing in PaintShop Pro

Basic Vector Graphic Drawing

See the video on youtube at this link: Make Shop Pro - Vector Graphic Drawing

There are three types of vector objects that can be created, these are Shapes, Lines, and Text.  For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll focus on shapes and lines.

Shapes

To draw a shape, simply click on the Vector Graphic tool which will be any of the icons below depending on what was selected last.

Once the tool type is selected, you can simply drag on the image to draw the shape.  

We'll discuss how to manipulate this shape below.

Lines

To draw a vector line, you'll need to first click on the Pen Tool

In the Pen Tool menu (typically upper left), you'll see there are three types of lines you can draw:  Line, Bezier and Freehand.  Select which type you want to draw.

Before attempting to draw, ensure that on your Materials palette that the Line material (upper left, shown as black) is not transparent or has a color you can see.  If don't want to have a fill color applied, ensure the fill color (bottom right) is set to off/transparent.

Also make sure you line Width is not set to zero.

Next based on which type of line you want to draw, you can now draw a line on the image.  The unique characteristics of each can be seen below.

This concludes the basics of drawing lines and shapes.  Now let's get into fine massaging these lines and shapes.

Node Manipulation

Editing Mode

Once a shape has been drawn, it is limited in how it can be modified.  Changes are relegated to shape-level distortions such as scaling, and adjusting the perspective.  If you want to control the individual nodes you first need to convert the shape, and this is done by selecting it, and right-clicking and choosing Convert to Path.

Next, the tool used to modified the nodes is the Pen Tool, so click on that.

Handles

With the Pen Tools selected, you can now click on individual nodes, and when you do this handles will appear on the node.

Clicking and dragging the ends of the handles will allow you to change the shape of the curves that it generates.  Also, the node itself can be moved to modify the shape.

 Adding/Removing Nodes

To add a node, simply hold [Ctrl] and click on any point along the edge of the shape.  To remove a node (which is the equivalent of a merge), hold [Ctrl] and click on an existing node.

Node Types

You can change the Node Type by right-clicking on the node and choose Node Type, and from there you can select either Asymmetric, Symmetric or Cusp.  Symmetric is the default.

Choosing Cusp allows you to modify the angle of the lines entering the node, and thus create sharp points.

Knife Tool

The knife tool is useful cutting out parts of the shape, more specifically the line however, the fill portion can be affected as well.  The knife tool can be enabled by clicking on it in the Pen Tool Menu.  In the image below it is the greyed out icon in the Mode section.

Although it is hard to show with images how it is used, simply drag a "cut" line across the edge of the shape.  This will create a dark circle at the point of the cut.  There are now two nodes at that point that you can manipulate independently.

If you make a second cut at a different point (as shown below), you now have a separated segment.

If there is a node in between the cuts, you can select that node and hit the [delete] key and that segment will be removed.

Masking

One other aspect to cover with vector graphics is the idea of painting above them.  In a tutorial where I show how to draw with vector graphics, at one point I paint shadows over specific objects.

The basic idea is to have a raster layer over the vector.  Create a selection using the magic wand in RGB mode from the vector object.  Then on a new raster layer (with the selection still in place), use the paintbrush to add some color.

The result of using a blue paintbrush could be something like below.

This is very similar to using the Layer Lock capability, however that requires you to convert your vector graphic object to a Raster Layer, which then prevents you from modifying it later if need be, so I prefer this method.