Exercise #2: Use selections, Fill them in

Open a new document. Make it 20x20 pixels again. This time though, in the "New Document" dialogue box, choose "Transparent" for the "Background Contents". This will open your document without any color present, not even white. It lacks a "Background Layer". What your file consists of is one transparent "Layer" which is the more accurate way to refer to it. It'll probably look white, or have a checkered pattern if you haven't turned off the grid in the preferences as I suggested earlier.

Zoom in all the way and choose the Rectangular Marquee Tool. The Rectangular Marquee tool is a means of selecting rectangular areas. Its alternate form is the Elliptical Marquee Tool, which you can toggle to by pressing "SHIFT" + "M". This will toggle back and forth between the two. Or you can click and hold on the Marquee tool icon in the tool palette and it will give you choices.

So, click somewhere near the upper left of the window & make a rectangle, but make it smaller than the window so there's some room around it. Something like this:

Now that you have this selection, choose a foreground color and "Fill" it with a color using the keyboard only. On a Mac, to fill an entire Layer or a selected area, press "OPTION" + "DELETE". On PC it's "ALT" + "BACKSPACE". This will fill this marquee in with the foreground color. Mine turned out like this:

You can also fill selections and Layers using the current Background color as well using "OPTION" + "DELETE" on Mac, "CNTRL" + "BACKSPACE/DELETE" on PC. Try choosing a Background color (click on it in the "Tools" palette or the "Colors" palette) and filling a new Marquee selection with the background color now. I make selections and fill them these ways quite often. Using Selection tools are very helpful in making pixel art in many ways. I could have used the Paint Bucket tool to fill that selected area, but I'll get to better uses for that tool later. You don't really need to see a screenshot of the Foreground/Background selectors, do you? Ookay… it's this thing:

Filling a layer without a selection: If you have nothing selected and while Filling like I just described, you will just fill the entire layer with one color. This is good for making background layers. try it out some time.

Okay, now let's Delete what we've created on this Layer. I do this often by using the keyboard alone to "Select All", and deleting the contents of that Layer. "Select All" by pressing "COMMAND" + "A" on Mac, "CTRL" + "A" on PC. Or, you can choose "Select" > "All" in the menu up top. This will create a selection lining the edges of the layer. You can use this selection to Delete what is on this layer by pressing the "DELETE" key & on PC, you can hit "BACKSPACE" or "DELETE". I don't think I need to show a screenshot of any of this. :)

Note: If you want to keep your examples, and don't like to throw anything away, you can save each example and open a new file for each new example OR just make new Layers to work on in your Photoshop document & hide the previous ones if you have experience with Layers already. Otherwise do some research or wait. I'm not going to get into working with and managing Layers and the Layers Palette in detail until Part II of this tutorial.

Deselecting: The graphic contents of the layer may now be gone, but the Selection remains! A fast way to "Deselect" an active selection is to press "COMMAND" + "D" on Mac, and "CTRL" + "D" on PC. Poof! It's gone. You can also Deselect a selection by clicking outside of it when a Selection tool is active (Marquee, Lasso, Magic Wand). In this case, that is an option. If you have the entire layer selected, clicking outside of it isn't really an option.

Constraining Proportions: Let’s use the Rectangular Marquee tool now to easily create a perfect square using the "SHIFT" key. Shift is a modifier for a number of tools, but in the case of selections, it can "Constrains Proportions" when used in the way I'll describe. In the case of the Rectangular Marquee tool this means it will create a square. Try making a square and then fill it with a color of your choice.

Try clicking towards the upper left of your window and drag the Marquee to the lower right area holding SHIFT. it's a Square!

Elliptical Marquee tool: You should also play with the Elliptical Marquee tool in the same way. Choose that tool ("SHIFT" + "M") to make it active. If you haven't done this already, uncheck "Anti-alias" in the tool options. It may still be checked, even if you unchecked it for the Rectangular Marquee tool. So, Delete your square, and draw an ellipse now. Fill that in. Pat yourself on the back. Also try holding SHIFT when dragging the ellipse to constrain it to a circle. I made these selections myself and filled them all the same ways as before. Here's how mine look:

Mmm… colors… Okay, so there you have the basics of the Marquee tool.

Exercise #3: Advanced Selections