How to Draw Clipart in Photoshop ... Without the Pen Tool

Draw Madonna - or Any Clipart - in Photoshop

What can I say? When you've got umpteen things on your plate and you've got to come up with a new graphic for something or other - like yesterday, if possible - you welcome shortcuts that result in a fantastic little graphic. If it takes you a quarter of the time but looks just as good, who can complain, right? Certainly not me.

So I was playing around with some shapes I'd made for My-Photoshop and realized that I'd essentially made myself a really cool shortcut to things like clipart for logos and headers. Since all the drawing is done beforehand, in the form of a custom Photoshop shape, all that is left is to color it ... and I couldn't think of anything more enjoyable to do with my evening than share this idea with you. (No comments, please ... I know how much that says!)

Without further ado ... here's a guide to drawing Vogue - style Madonna without once touching the pen tool in Photoshop.

Draw Madonna (or any other clipart) - The Steps

1. Download the Shape - If you don't have a shape that you already want to use, you'll want to grab this one real fast. To install it, you'll need to place the file in your presets folder. On a PC, you'll go to "Start", click "My Computer" and select your Local Disc (usually "C"). Inside this folder, open "Program Files" and then open "Adobe". Next, open the Photoshop folder, and go to "Presets". One last folder to open - "Custom Shapes". Drag and drop or cut and paste the shape file into here.

Do this step before you open Photoshop, so that the software will automatically load the shape up for you.

2. New Canvas - Open a new canvas in Photoshop, in RGB mode with a white background, at any size that you like as long as it's square. This is the cool thing about true vector shapes - you can make them as large or as small as you like without any loss of quality. Besides, they also do a whole bunch of drawing for you which saves tons of time.

My canvas is 500 x 500 pixels in size basically because it's easy for me to work with on my teeny monitor.