Create Your Own Custom Shapes in Photoshop

Written by Steve Patterson. In this Photoshop tutorial, we're going to look at everything you need to know to create and work with custom shapes in Photoshop. There's a lot to cover, so we're going to break things up into two parts.
In Part 1, we'll look at how to create a shape, how to define it as a custom shape, and then how to call it up and use it whenever we need it. In Part 2, we'll look at how to collect and save multiple shapes into custom shape sets!
I came up with the idea for this tutorial after looking through a scrapbooking magazine recently and coming across pages and pages of simple, ready-made shapes, all packaged together neatly into different themes, that people could buy for ridiculously high prices, and I immediately thought, "Hey! You could create these shapes in Photoshop for, like, FREE!". You don't need to be into digital scrapbooking, though, to benefit from knowing how to create your own custom shapes.
For one thing, creating them is just plain fun! Creating a whole bunch of them and collecting them into different sets is even more fun! You can use custom shapes as decorations in digital scrapbooking pages, but you can also use them in professional design work. Or combine a custom shape with a vector mask to create really interesting photo borders! Before we can do any of that, though, we first need to learn how to create them!

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One more thing I should point out before we begin. Creating custom shapes involves using the Pen Tool. You can create them out of Photoshop's basic Shape tools, like the Rectangle Tool or the Ellipse Tool, but unless you want to limit yourself to creating shapes that look like boxes or bicycle tires, you're going to need to use the Pen Tool. We cover how to use the Pen Tool in great detail in our Making Selections With The Pen Tool tutorial, so we won't be going over all that stuff again here. Be sure to read through that tutorial first though if you're not familiar with the wacky world of the Pen.

In this tutorial, we're going to create our custom shape by tracing around an object in an image. If you have a natural talent for drawing and can draw your shape freehand without needing to trace around anything, great! There's no difference between tracing an object or drawing one freehand and there's no benefit to either way of doing it (other than bragging rights), but I personally find it easier to trace around objects (I have no natural talents), and that's what we'll be doing here.

I'm going to turn Mr. Gingerbread Man here into a custom shape:

Mr. Gingerbread Man.

Let's get started!

Step 1: Select The Pen Tool

As I mentioned, you can create custom shapes in Photoshop using the basic Shape tools like the Rectangle or Ellipse Tool, but try tracing our gingerbread man with those tools and you're likely to want to bite his head off (sorry, just a little gingerbread man humor). What we really need is the Pen Tool, so select it from the Tools palette:

Select the Pen Tool.

You can also select the Pen Tool by pressing the letter P on your keyboard.

Step 2: Select The "Shape Layers" Option In The Options Bar

With the Pen Tool selected, look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen. Over on the left, you'll see a group of three icons:

The three icons in the Options Bar which allow us to select what we want to do with the Pen Tool.

These icons represent what you can do with the Pen Tool. The icon on the right is grayed out, and that's because it's only available when we have one of the basic Shape tools selected (the Pen Tool and the Shape tools share most of the same options in the Options Bar). As we saw in our "Making Selections With The Pen Tool" tutorial, the icon in the middle is used when we want to draw paths, but that's not what we want to do here. We want to use the Pen Tool to draw shapes, and for that, we need to select the icon on the left, which is the Shape layers icon:

Select the "Shape layers" icon to draw shapes with the Pen Tool.

The "Shape layers" option is selected by default whenever you grab the Pen Tool so you probably won't need to select it yourself. It's a good idea though to check and make sure it's selected before you begin drawing your shape.
I should point out here that there's no difference between drawing paths with the Pen Tool and drawing shapes with it. Both are created exactly the same way, by clicking to add anchor points, then dragging out direction handles if needed to create straight or curved path segments (again, see our Making Selections With The Pen Tool tutorial if you're unfamiliar with these terms). In fact, regardless of whether you're "officially" drawing shapes or paths, you're drawing paths. The difference is that with shapes, Photoshop fills the path with color, even as you're drawing it, which is what allows us to see the shape.
This is actually going to create a bit of a problem for us, as we'll see in a moment.

Step 3: Begin Drawing Your Shape

Now that we have the Pen Tool selected along with the "Shape layers" option in the Options Bar, we can begin tracing around the object. I'm going to start by tracing around the top of the gingerbread man, clicking with the Pen Tool to place anchor points and dragging out direction handles to create curved path segments around the side and top of his head. We can see the anchor points and direction handles in the screenshot below, but notice that we also have a bit of a problem. Photoshop is filling the shape with the Foreground color (mine is currently set to black) as I draw it, blocking the gingerbread man from view:

Photoshop fills the shape with the Foreground color as you draw it, blocking the object from view.