Photoshop Tutorial: Easy Arrowheads

Jul 10, 2008 by Jennifer Farley    6 Comments    Posted under: Blog

Photoshop has tools that allows you to quickly create an arrowhead, you just use the line tool and some options from the Options Bar. Here’s how to make an arrow;

1. On the toolbar, select the the line tool. It’s may be hidden under the rectangle tool.

   
   

2. Up in the Options Bar, select either a shape layer, a path or “fill pixels”. In this case, I chose fill pixels.

   
   

3. Farther along the Options Bar, you’ll see icons for the six shape tools. Click on the down facing triangle beside the “gooey” star shape.

   
   

4. The drop down box gives you options to click a checkbox to add arrowheads to either the beginning or end of your line, and you can choose the Width, Length, the Concavity (fancy!).
5. To vary the chunky-ness of your arrow, you can set a value for the weight on the Options Bar. For this example I set the weight to 20. Then you simply click and drag out to draw whatever size arrow you need.

All of the shapes below were created using this method and by varying the width, length and concavity values. Because you’re drawing with vector tools you get lovely clean, smooth edges.

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