The custom shape tool

Have you ever wondered how to draw shapes such as lines in PSE ? Have you ever tried actually drawing a straight line with your paintbrush tool? I have and had my geometry teacher seen the result, she would have cringed! That was before I knew the existence of the nifty shape tool. PSE refers to it as a Custom Shape Tool. You can load any shape into PSE as long as its in the correct format - a .csh format. There are a ton of free Custom Shape Format files available on the web. Don't let the "for Photoshop" deter you from trying them out. They work just as well in its younger brother Elements. All you need to do is save the file to the presets/custom shapes folder inside your PSE's application menu. Then you restart Elements.

So what can you do with the custom shapes menu? Quite a bit actually if you are creative. For e.g. you could make a plain hardwood floor such as below

Look like its got hearts engraved in it like so -

All you would do after adding the shape, is group the shapes into one layer (if you've used multiple like in my case above and reduce the opacity of the shape layer to get the image below