This is the first lesson in a series of Photoshop tutorials intended for beginning to intermediate users. The goal of these lessons will be to draw the watch in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

By far the most powerful and useful set of tools in the Photoshop tool kit are the selection tools. Selection tools can be used to draw just about anything. For this lesson, we are going to draw the bezel of the watch with selection tools.

To start this project, open a new canvas in Photoshop by going to the 'File' menu and selecting 'New'. Choose the following settings for your new canvas: Width: 600 pixels; Height: 400 pixels; Resolution: 72 pixels/inch (standard resolution for web art); Mode: RGB color (used for soft media, such as web art). Make sure the units for your canvas are set to pixels, and not inches, otherwise you'll end up with a huge canvas. The watch bezel is a relatively simple shape, a rectangle and a circle. Before we start drawing though, we need to set some guides up. Make sure you have the rulers visible (CTRL-R or go to the View Menu and select 'Show Rulers') and that the rulers are set up to display pixel units instead of inches. Set this up by going to the 'File' menu and selecting 'Preferences', then selecting 'Units & Rulers'. You can create guides by clicking on one of the rulers and dragging the cursor into the canvas. Drag one guide in from the side and another in from the top to meet in a crosshair dead center (so you'll have a vertical guide at 300x and a horizontal at the 200y mark). Next, create two more vertical guides 100 pixels from the center guide, on either side (at the 200x and 400x marks).

Then create two horizontal guides at the 100y and 300y marks. Your guides should look like the blue lines in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

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