Using brushes

Elements has several types of what I class as artist's brush tools. These are the Pencil tool, the Brush tool, the Impressionist Brush tool, and the Color Change tool.

The Pencil tool, all alone on its own peg on the Tool bar, is possibly the least used of all of Element's many tools because, as I mentioned previously, unless you are a skilled graphic artist experienced with a pen tablet, it's very hard to use:

Brush behavior

Though Elements is mostly a photo editing program, many of its tools rely on the use of a brush (and in my opinion, brush-based tools such as Dodge, Burn, and Sponge are some of the most creative in Elements).

But it doesn't end with these three excellent retouching brush tools. Elements contains a wide range of "real" (digital) brushes to paint, sketch, draw, and illustrate with, either by brushing on top of an existing image or starting from scratch with a blank canvas.

If that...