Tutorial: Chunky Diagonals In Photoshop
Filed under Photoshop
All righty, seeing as our visitor rate is taking a plunge, looks like it’s about time for me to break out some kind of tutorial.
So, yesterday I decided to give my desktop a little pizzaz and went to making myself a new wallpaper. Now, I saw a wallpaper with some snazzy chunky diagonal lines and it inspired me to create a wallpaper for myself using some. Unfortunately, I had only recently learned how to make the bitty diagonals, and was at a loss on how to do the chunk ones properly. I found a few on Google that went about teaching it in a somewhat (how can I explain this?…) mathematical sort of way.
I will tell you now, math is my most terrible subject (I don’t know how I got away with the grades I did without understanding a lick of what I did in math classes). So explaining how to do the chunky diagonals with numbers just wasn’t cutting it for me. I decided to try it on my own (and got nowhere fast). Yeti happened to look in what I was doing and started explaining it in a more visual manner, pointing out where lines would go to make a proper diagonal all nice and chunky.
Needless to say, I got a wonderful new snazzy wallpaper on my desktop and a new tutorial to explain how to do the same chunky monkey diagonals.
Okay, so the first thing to do is to open up a file with matching height and width in odd numbers. Why odd numbers? I have no real decent explanation to give you, but I remember one of the tutorials on Google mentioned that it was easier to do the diagonals with odd numbers (there’s probably a better scientific explanation out there), and using 25 x 25, it worked wonderfully, so why go against the grain?
So yeah, for the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll start with a new document at 25 x 25 pixels.
When you get your file started, you’ll see it as a rather small box on your screen. So just go ahead and use the zoom tool or mouse scroll wheelie to max the zoom right up to 1600%. This way, it’s easier to see what you’re working with when we start laying out the diagonals.
Next, we’re gonna choose the pencil tool, which is what we’ll be using to draw in the diagonals. Because we’re working at 25 x 25, make sure to check that your pencil size is at 1.
(You’d think it’d show up as one box against the default grey/white grid, but it actually takes up four of the boxes!)
All right, so what you’ll do next is just start at the bottom-most corner of the square and click once to place the first box of the diagonal. After the click, press and hold the shift button and move the mouse to the opposite corner of the square. Click! You should have a diagonal going from bottom-left to top-right.
Remember: Bottom-left corner > Click left mouse button once > Press and hold Shift button > Top-right corner > Click left mouse button = Spiffy Diagonal
(We’re going to be using this shift click maneuver throughout the whole tutorial.)
This diagonal is your main diagonal, and we’ll build our thickness using this as a starting point, letting it grow outwards (this is how I keep track of how big my diagonal is and where to place the next diagonals).
Now, starting at the bottom-left corner again, just position the pencil cursor one spot to the right from where we first started. Then start the Click, Shift, Click procedure, this time stopping just under the main diagonal’s last mark.
Now, to make a seamless diagonal, I can’t begin to explain how doing this next step helps the diagonal keep it’s shape, but it does, so bare with me.
Every time you add a diagonal to the main first one we started with, you’ll have to add a diagonal to its corresponding corner.
So, we’ve done a diagonal on the bottom of the main diagonal, this means we’ll have to add a diagonal on the bottom right (the side its facing). Because it’s just the first extra diagonal, the corner diagonal is only one box click. The more diagonals we add to the main, the more we’ll be doing the Click, Shift, Click to build up the corners.
Okay, I don’t want a lopsided diagonal, so we’ll do what we just did, but this time, we’re doing it just above the main diagonal. We’ll start one box above our first starting point, Click, Shift, Click just to the left of the last box from the main diagonal. I know it sounds tricksy, but you’ll get the hang of it.
Again, because we’ve added one extra diagonal to the main, we’re gonna need to add a diagonal to the corner it’s facing. So, adding that diagonal on top, it faces the top-left corner, and that’s where we add our mark.
What we’ve done, with the diagonal and corner trick is the whole gist to this tutorial. Move one over from the last diagonal you make near the main diagonal, Click, Shift, Click, add its corresponding diagonal on the corner it faces, and then repeat on the opposite side of the main diagonal.
So long as you remember to make a corner diagonal for every extra diagonal from the main, you’ll be fine.
By this next set of pictures, you’ll start to see the chunkiness of the diagonal pop out. I’ve temporarily colored the diagonals so hopefully it’s understood just what I’m trying to explain.
The picture on the end is one main diagonal (black) with the five diagonals on each side of it (11 diagonals in all in the middle), and five diagonals on the opposite corners (one diagonal for every one you add in the middle). Yeah, the numbers of it can get confusing, so hopefully the pictures help.
All right, I think that’s pretty chunky enough (you can always add more now that you know the trick to it) for this tutorial.
The next step is to click on the Edit button > Define Pattern… and get this saved as a useable pattern.
Name your new pattern whatever you want!
Just start up a new document and use the marquee tool to make a square or circle and fill it with a color (I had to change mine to white in the next picture, because I forgot my stripes are default black). This is just so you can see how to use your new pattern in things. (Rather than make a shape, you can also just fill an empty layer.)
Click Edit > Fill…
And choose to Use: Pattern > Custom Pattern: (whatever you named your pattern! If you haven’t made any new ones since, it’ll be the last one in the grid)
Voila! You’ve got some thick and chunky lines for use!
You can use these same steps to make a chunky diagonal going the opposite way too, just remember to Click, Shift, Click and to keep a diagonal in the corner for every one you add to the middle ends!
Here are a couple more diagonals, just using the same pattern on multiple rectangular shapes. Hope this tutorial helped, and if it did, please comment and let us know!
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