It's the same colour as the area.

Happens to me a lot with the default
I think I made a circle brush and started smudging with that to fix

It's cause you're splitting pixels
You're grabbing pixels and empty space and smudging them

Which is why you get oddly colored residue

This post was edited by Sena on Dec 15 2014 08:50am

Thanks, this fixed it!

Can anyone recommend a good pen tool tutorial?

there are seriously no good pen tool tutorials and it's something that you can't really teach.

you have to just fucking learn to use it.

this or watch some illustrator tuts on youtube, so by giving you an object to rebuild you might learn it....

you just have to do it like nereaux said

the best you can hope for in a pen tool tutorial is one that explains the modifiers for the basic pen tool, how they function, and how you can manipulate anchors to understand how they will affect your path.

the latter is something that you have to "feel" because it's not something that can really be taught, you just have to practice.

i always tell people to start simple, with a banana or an apple, just to learn how the tool functions at different curve angles.

the ultimate goal would be to vector your reference image in as few anchors as possible.



this is an example of poor control. the anchors are indicated in with red dots

compared to this:



which is a better example, as there are fewer anchors, which results in a smoother vector.

furthermore you should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS use illustrator for vector. the pen tool in illy is much better than the photoshop counterpart, and it's not possible to get true vector works in photoshop. the paths themselves are vector components, but the fill is rasterized so it's essentially lower quality no matter what you do.

This post was edited by Nereaux on Dec 18 2014 04:47am

Alright.

long story Xan.