2. Creating Simple GraphicsThis 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).
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