Pencil Tool
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PSDTUTS Photoshop Wiki / Photoshop Tools / Pencil Tool
The Pencil Tool is a bit of a relic that’s no longer used by the majority of Photoshop users. This tool is similar to the Brush Tool except that it has no flow or airbrush controls; it only produces hard pixels.
Today, it’s primarily used for pixel art, and has few other applications. It was, at one time, the tool of choice for drawing small icons, but now the preferable method is to draw the icon at a larger size with the proper tools and then resize it.
Pencil Tool Options
Like most of the Pencil Tool options, the Tool Presets and Brush Preset palettes are identical to those found in the brush tool’s settings. Under the Brush Preset palette, the Hardness setting is present because Photoshop uses the same brush preset palette throughout the application, but it doesn’t do anything.
The Mode dropdown menu provides you with blending modes, including the two brush-specific modes: Behind and Clear.
The Opacity slider allows you to modify the transparency of the pencil.
Auto Erase is unique to the pencil tool. It paints the background colors over pixels that contain the foreground color. This can be useful when you’re doing pixel drawing, since you won’t need to go over painted pixels but you may need to quickly remove one you painted by accident.
Usage
The Pencil Tool’s keyboard shortcut is Shift+B if you’re already using the Brush Tool. Otherwise, you need to press B, then Shift+B to access it.
Like the Brush Tool, using the Pencil is as simple as clicking and dragging to form lines. Pixel artists usually zoom in quite heavily to place single pixels and precise lines.
You can draw perfectly straight lines between two points by drawing a single dot, moving the mouse to the second point and clicking with Shift held down.
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