[...]... organic quality to the line work 1 To remain consistent with the loose drawing style, you may want to add a fill color that bleeds outside of the outlines a little There are several ways to achieve this by painting on a new layer below the outline art or setting the brush to “Paint Behind” and painting on the same layer 3 6 Always design your characters with the intended purpose in mind: animation Form... the drawing tools to trace it by hand But that can be very time-consuming depending on the complexity of the image The trick here is to average down the amount of colors your image contains, and Adobe Photoshop makes this an almost effortless task Combine that with the Trace Bitmap engine in Flash, and you won’t even have to select one single drawing tool! 18 Import the optimized GIF into Flash Cr... combination of tools and techniques to get the job done For this character design I went from a rough pencil sketch to a fully rendered vector drawing using the Pen tool and basic shapes The Pen tool, in combination with the Selection tool, offers infinite flexibility when it comes to manipulating strokes and shapes 16 A linear gradient is perfect for the eyeshadow Choose the color you want for the initial... the Snap to Objects tool is also selected in the toolbox 2 An alternative way to mix colors in Flash is to click the color wheel button in the upper right corner This will open the color palette mixer that is native to your operating system Mix your new color and click “OK” 6 20 HOT TIP Draw a diagonal line inside the fill of your shape Use the Selection tool s to drag each end point of the line so they... Onionskin tool This allows me to trace the image in a new frame while using the original image as a reference 7 Using the Oval o and Rectangle r tools allows us to quickly achieve the basic forms of our character The Selection tool is great for pushing and pulling these basic fills into custom shapes based on our sketch 4 Turn on the Snap option (magnet icon), and drag corners to each other so they snap together... same result in Flash With all the various tools at our disposal, I am constantly finding different ways of using them to achieve various effects Cell shading is commonly referred to as “toon shading” This style of shading is popular with comic book style artwork and classic Disney films I have discovered four different ways to achieve cell style shading for you to choose from Select the Line tool n and... good time to adjust the contrast, saturation, colors or whatever else you prefer to edit 1 P “PUCK”, OFFICIAL LA FLASH MASCOT HOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES can be used to add a measure of realism to any Flash project They can be imported and used in their original state, or they can be simpified for a unique, stylized look The obvious approach to vectorizing photographs is to import the image into Flash and use... bitmap icon in the document library) and select “Apply Smoothing” This will apply anti-aliasing to your image and make it appear smoother 6 SHORTCUTS MAC WIN BOTH 15 The Pen tool Start with a scanned sketch or draw directly into Flash Create a blank keyframe on frame 2 and turn on the Onionskin feature Using the sketch as reference, trace the hair using the Pen tool by clicking and dragging each point as... technique requires breaking down each body part of the character into basic building blocks using the Rectangle and Oval tools It’s a fast and efficient way to simplify the character into manageable sections while achieving a very professional cartoon style Here, we will use shapes to cut in to other shapes This is a very useful technique for cutting holes out of objects as well as altering the edges of shapes... Smoothing” This will apply anti-aliasing to your image and make it appear smoother As an option, set the quality of your movie to “BEST” by adding one line of code to frame 1 of the main timeline Your bitmaps will look their best but will demand more from your processor during playback - user beware The final step is to convert all parts to symbols and add a slight amount of dark tint to the instances . Brush tool Mixing colors Using gradients Adding texture The Pen tool Trace Bitmap Shading 1: line trick Shading 2: shape it Shading 3: paint selected Shading. certainly not teach you how to be a fraud. To cheat in Flash is to find shortcuts to help you work more efficiently and economically. Time translates to