Photoshop contains some great vector tools and features. But when it comes to creating works of art, experienced digital artists, illustrators, and designers are rarely limited to a single software application. It’s no secret that when it comes to vector drawing, there’s no better option than Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator has been the industry standard vector art tool for as long as I can remember.

Personally, I’ve been using it as an integral part of my digital toolset since 1991. The features and functionality within Illustrator are certainly second to none, but what do you do when you want all the great vector creation possibilities Illustrator has to offer, but also Do you want the great features of the paint tool in Photoshop? The answer is simple: You combine the two applications.

And believe it or not, when it comes to creating a stunning Art Noveau masterpiece like the one you see here, you simply need to copy and paste. Bottom line: Photoshop and Illustrator work great together. We’ll explore the advantages of bringing existing vector art from Illustrator into Photoshop and using it as the vector building blocks to create the piece you see here.

More specifically, we’ll be pasting vector art into Photoshop, creating shape layers and paths as Illustrator data makes its way into Photoshop. We’ll use paths to create selection borders and duplicate and edit shape layers to suit a variety of purposes. Once the vectors are secure in place, we can employ Photoshop’s wonderful painting and compositing tools, resulting in a nostalgic piece of art that is a combination of sharp vectors and softly painted elements.

In general, when I see inexperienced Illustrator users trying to create artwork in a similar style, they rely on the stroke attributes to create the outline of the image. An unfortunate result of this method is that there is little or no expressive quality to the line work. What makes line work expressive in the context of an illustration is the variation in thickness and the way the ends of each line taper, are sharp, or are rounded.

Of course, there are options within the Stroke palette that allow you to change the endpoints of the line; but again, like the uniform stroke weight, they just aren’t expressive enough. The best way to achieve the desired expressive quality is to pay attention to the sketch. When we draw, something intuitive happens, and it becomes an effortless or even subconscious act to create expressive line work. Inside the software it’s a different story. We need to focus on preserving the innate expressive quality of our drawing while creating the finished product.

This goal cannot be achieved by using stroke attributes but rather by creating each element manually with the Pen Tool. However, there is more to it than just mastering the Pen tool. There is a logical method of construction, which is to first create an outer form. The next step is to subtract an interior. This will give you your expressive outline. After that, the details are created as closed forms, and the result is unified. The Pathfinder palette plays a central role in this systematic drawing process.