Most of the pages make you do simple curves, because practice is the way to learn!
See the links board, I posted
a thread (click here) about pen tutorials.
In the meantime, see those excellent tips:
Gustavo Sanchez, a member of the User2user forum, gave me his kind permission to repost some of his excellent tips about the pen tool:
"This is one of those things that is dead easy to explain if both people are together in the same room and you can exactly see what the other is doing.
However, I'll try to explain how I do paths. If other people feel like adding up their experiences and tricks, those who have doubts will make themselves a reasonably fair idea of how to dow paths and what for.
1. I am talking about Photoshop and paths.
2. Use TAB frequently to hide ALL palettes.
3. Insist a lot in using CTRL+PLUS (numeric keyboard) and CTRL+MINUS to zoom in and zoom out CONSTANTLY. Readjusting view pays back when tracing with the pen.
4. We tend to have a good direction and a bad direction when tracing. I don't know why but I tend to trace better when I do it from left to right and from top to bottom. Learn your direction and adapt your working habits.
5. [IMPORTANT] Don't click new anchor points 'dry'. Always click, mantain the mouse button pressed and drag a little in the natural direction the path is going to follow. So, you'll create handlers and they'll be in the needed direction.
6. When making this dragging, try to follow the natural direction of the contour if it's a curve, that will save extra points and the shape will be smoother.
7. Avoid extra points like the pest: Printing devices hate them.
8. When reaching a turning point in the countour, avoid dragging. The usually cause an undesired bowell shape.
9. If you are following a curve, and you see the last point should have been in another position, still holding CTRL, click it, move it, reposition the handle as needed and then continue drawing.
10. You don't need to abandon the path to make zoom or move the picture inside the screen (use scroll bars or the navigator palette, as you wish).
11. If you need to abandon the path for a while, to get back to work, click again in the last point so that it turns black and then go ahead.
12. Don't get crazy with exactitude. Printing precision is the limit to what you need. Excess of accuracy in a tracing path is just bloating the file.
13. In case of doubt with the countour, make the path a little tiny bit inside the shape. If you leave 'other things' inside the path, they will show afterwards as a weird halo.
14. A path is not the end. You can turn it into a mask and then refine it with transparency, soft borders in some zones and the like.
15. When making a path, sometimes the image is too dark and you cannot tell the background from the picture itself. However, if you apply curves in some wacky way, most of times, there is a curves shape where you can differenciate them. Apply a temporary curves layer in those cases.
Hope this helps"
