(thank you knmt for sending me this tut!)

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create spiffy-looking complex geometric shapes using pre-defined Photoshop shapes. The final effect looks pretty cool, almost like tattoos, and they are dead easy and fun to make!

Let’s get started.

Alright, the first thing you need to do is create a new document. You’d
probably want something square-shaped, mine was 400×400px. Next, grab
the Custom Shape Tool.

Load ‘Shapes’ in the Shapes Toolbar. This will open up a collection of various badge/flower-type shapes which we will be using.

You’ll also want to make sure Shape Layers is selected.

Prep work is done! Now it’s time to experiment. Select from the
Shapes Toolbar one of the flowers/badges. You don’t need to select the
exact same shape as I did.

Now to place it on the canvas. Hold down Shift while dragging out the shape (this will keep it in proportion – unless you want a skewed flower).

Now we’re going to adjust the shape. Grab the Direct Selection Tool.

As its name implies, the Direct Selection Tool
allows you to select specific points without selecting the entire
path/shape. We want to select the points on the inside of the flower,
so you can just drag a box to encompass those inner points

And great, we missed one! Do you see the unfilled-dot at the top? We’ll need to select that.

Hold down Shift (this will let you select additional points). Now either click on the missing point or drag a box around it to select.

Now that we’ve got all out points accounted for, hold down Ctrl-T to enter into Transform mode. A bounding box should appear. Grab a corner, hold down Shift (to keep it in proportion) and Alt (to keep the axis centered). Now you can drag the corner towards the middle to scale it down.

Once you have it as you like, feel free to twirl it around. Move
your mouse away from the corner until a little rotate symbol appears.
Grab the corner and spin it as you like!

Once you have something neat, click Commit Transform (looks like a checkmark) in the toolbar.

Here’s what I have so far:

Head on over to the next page to work on the outer points.

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