Week 2 (Part 4: Painting Tools)

Paint bucket and fill command (G)

These Tools/Commands are used to fill an area with a color or a pattern. You can fill the whole canvas or constrict your fill to a selection if it was previously established.

Gradient Tool (G)

What is a gradient? A gradient, sometimes referred to as a vignette (pronounced vinˈyet), is an area of color that smoothly transitions from one color to another gradually. This area can also have many transitions of color from flowing from one, to another, to another from beginning to end.

With the gradient tool it is very easy to create these gradients by choosing starting and ending colors as well as transition points inbetween them. You can also establish different shapes of your gradient fills from linear, to radial, to angular, just to name a few. You can also save your customized gradients for later use.

Brush Palette

The brush palette is very widely used through out the Photoshop application. Familiarizing yourself with it will only be beneficial. There are many tools that you will be using that work in conjunction with the brush settings chosen in this palette.

This is where you will be setting the various controls of how you want your brush to paint. Do you want a small radius with a soft feather like edge or do you require a large brush with a hard surrounding edge? These are the types of settings you apply to your brushes. (among many many others).


Here are a few very handy quick keys when using any tool that utilizes a brush that will save you tons of time!

• [ (square left bracket) to decrease the size of your current brush
• ] (square right bracket) to increase the size of your current brush
• Shift + [ (square left bracket) to decrease brush softness/hardness in 25% increments
• ] (square right bracket) to increase brush softness/hardness in 25% increments

Start getting used to these ones right away. I don't usually push people to learn quick keys right away, but these ones are big time savers.

As with most settings in Photoshop, you can save your customized brushes for later use. You can even save a collection of brushes as set that you can load later. Photoshop also ships with a number of pre-set brush libraries to chose from to achieve different tasks.