Chapter 2. Creating Simple Graphics


2. Creating Simple Graphics

This chapter teaches you to use Macromedia Flash 8's drawing tools to create basic shapes from lines and areas of colorin Flash terminology, strokes and fills. Flash offers natural drawing tools that imitate the feel of drawing or painting on paper with pencil or brush; geometric-shape tools that make it easy to draw predefined shapes; and a pen tool that lets you draw with precision, using Bézier curves.

You can edit all shapes with the Bézier sub-selection tooleven those drawn with the other tools. You also can modify any shape by tugging on its outline instead of working with Bézier curves points and handles. (To learn about editing shapes, see Chapter 4.)

In previous versions of Flash, all the shapes you created were raw shapesall strokes and fills interacted with other strokes and fills on the same layer. In Flash 8, you can create raw shapes by using the drawing tools in Merge Drawing mode, or you can use a new featureObject Drawing modeto create editable shapes that don't interact with other shapes (you'll learn more about how graphic elements interact in Chapter 5).

Flash also lets you import graphics from other programs. If you create graphics in a program such as Macromedia FreeHand or Adobe Illustrator, you can import them into Flash for animation (see Chapter 14).

About Strokes and Fills

What do stroke and fill mean? A stroke is an outline, and a fill is a solid area of color. Picture a coloring book, with black lines creating the pictures: Those lines are strokes. When you fill in the areas outlined by strokessay, with crayonthat colorful area is the fill. In a coloring book, you start with an outline and create the fill inside it. In Flash, you can work the other way aroundstart with a solid shape and then create the outline as a separate element.

Flash's oval, rectangle, and polystar tools allow you to create an element that's just a stroke or just a fill, or to create the stroke and fill elements simultaneously. The line tool, as you might guess, creates only strokes. The pen tool can create both strokes and fills.

The concept of fills and strokes is a bit trickier to grasp in relation to the brush tool. This tool creates fills. These fills may look like lines or brushstrokes, but they are shapes you can outline with a stroke. Flash has special tools for adding, editing, and removing strokes and fills: the ink bottle, the paint bucket, and the faucet eraser. See Chapter 4 for more details.





Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows & Macintosh Visual QuickStart Guide
Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows & Macintosh
ISBN: 0321349636
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 204

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