Everybody has heard about "Vectors", but how does one use them in creating a drawing or painted image? I've always heard people say 'I can't draw a straight line!'. Well, I can't either, and even worse, I cannot draw a curve where I want it to be.

Perhaps that's why vectors were invented and implimented in PSP. I'll describe the vector operations as normally used. I'll try to start with simple images and develop them into complex objects. You're welcome to use any part of these instructions as you will.

Let's start by drawing a simple box and going on from there. Open a new image, 400 x 400, 16.7 m colors, transparent.

Click on the Draw tool.

Open the Tool Options and make certain the type is set to 'Point to Point' and 'Create as Vector' is checked. (Colors and style may be set later.)

Hold the cursor in position and tap the left button. This creates the first (Start) of the drawing.

OOPS! I got this! This just means I moved the cursor while clicking. There's ways to correct it. Hit the Delete key to delete the current point and click a new point or ...

Right Click to bring up the Nodes edit box. Select Node type- Convert to line. The arrow was a Curve influence. Later on, we'll be using those to create curved lines, but for now, we want straight lines. The keyboard shortcut for this function is: Ctrl-L (line), notice you can also define a line before and after the point we just plotted. (This is really more important when we do post editing.)

Click the four points of a square. You'll be able to adjust these Points (Nodes) later. As you click a new new node, a line (this is just a guide to show where the drawn line will go.) is drawn from the 'Current' node to the new one, and the new node becomes the current one. You can always spot the Current node because it's filled in. If you need to leave node editing or just lose focus and restart in node editing, the position of the current node may be lost. Click on the node to let it know it's the current one.

We need to close off the image by completing the sides. To do this, we'll close the object. Right Click on the screen to bring up the Edit box, click on Edit, then Close in the box that opens. (No, this doesn't close the program, it just draws a line from the End node to the Start node. Sometimes, you'll want to leave the object open as a line, but for now, we're drawing a box, so it's closed. If you're good at recalling short-cuts, you can use the Shift-Cntrl-C.

The outline of the box is now completed. This box obviously needs some adjustment to even look like a box. Click on any of the four nodes and drag them where they need to go. When you finish with one, just release the button.

Adjust the nodes to where you want them to go. Notice that I'm using the transparency checkerboard to line up the sides.

Adjust the position of all nodes to get the outline of the box into position.

Right Click the image to bring up the Edit box, and click on 'Quit Node Editing' or you can just click anywhere off the desktop.

The box is drawn, one pixel thick, yellow (this will be changed), and a selection box is drawn around the box. Now we'll change the Properties of the box, to see how that works. If the box was satisfactory, we'd leave it alone, but for this demo, we'll change it.

Click the Vector Object Select Tool. (We already have the object selected. If it were not, there's two ways to select it- by dragging around the object, or selecting it from the list in the Layer Palette.)

Right click on the object and select Properties. (NOTE:When working with a vector selection, be sure to position the cursor over a color pixel.

In the Properties box, you can change the color of the vector, the color of the fill, the width of the line, end Caps, Miters, Style, visibility, and Anti-alias. Note that I've changed the color of the line to black, the fill to pink, the style to Stroked and Filled. (Change color by clicking on the color swatch.)

Remember the Visible check box! Later, it'll be used to create an invisible curve that text will use for a base line!

Here is the finished box.. almost. Those boxes at the corners, middle of the lines and in the center of the box are Deformation handles. You can click on one of the sides and drag to stretch out that side.

Left clicking at the corner box allows distortion of the box in two directions, or to get a proportional increase/decrease, Right click and drag a corner.

Click on the rotation handle and drag to rotate the image around the center point. The center point cannot be moved. Clicking anywhere else in the selection which has any color will allow the object to be moved on the layer. When you click on a totally transparent area, PSP 6 often doesn't know what layer or object you're wanting to work with, so the results can be unusual, to say the least. If the center is transparent, there's still the center handle to click and drag.

Miscellaneous Notes: The smallest Vector Object that can be created is two nodes. A single node will just disappear into the bit bucket. A node may have either one or two lines, never more or less. Objects drawn with vectors may be open (The start and end nodes are not the same) or Closed (The start and end node are the same). A filled vector object which is Open will not flood the image.

Click here to advance into vector curves.