Traced an image and trying to color it in now

Adding to what Dave said, here is how you can add a stroke to your path, This is essentially adding a colour to the path outline which could be with a pencil or brush at a chosen thickness.

• In the Paths tab, select your path.
• Click on the icon in the top right corner of the panel (the 3 horizontal rows) to get the popup menu.
• Select Stroke Path...
• You can then choose Pencil or Brush (or other tools). This will add an outline based on the current thickness of that tool and the foreground colour.

To colour in - this could be done in multiple ways. I'd suggest you add the colours in a separate layer. You could use the paintbrush to paint the colours in the areas you want. You could use the outline layer or even the path to create selections to fill or delete areas.

As a beginner, it is worth looking at the different ways you can select parts of an image. Here is a page that covers various selection options in Photoshop.

Photoshop Elements Help | Use tools to make selections

Hi

From your description it sounds like you have made paths rather than shapes?

Can you post a screenshot of your layers and paths panels. That will confirm it.

Assuming that you have, the pen tool creates a path. So there is no image at this stage - just that path. From a path you could create a shape and use the shapes Fill and Stroke properties to colour it. However, if your paths overlap, after merging the paths,  the shape will not have separate colours within each section. So to use this technique it would have been better not to merge the paths

So an alternative is to create an empty layer (Layer - New Layer) and then select a brush. Then go back to the paths panel and click the circle icon at the bottom. This will stroke the path with your chosen brush so you now have pixel strokes in the shape of your path on that new layer.

Once we see your screenshot we can advise you further.

Dave