Flash CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Advanced Drawing and Coloring

Chapter 2 showed you how to create a simple drawing using Flash’s drawing and painting tools. But in real life—whether you’re pounding out Flash animations for your boss or for your own personal Web site—you’re rarely going to be satisfied with a simple drawing. For each keyframe of your animation, you’re going to want to start with a basic sketch and then play with it, changing its color, moving a line here and there, adding a graphic element or two, and repositioning it until it looks exactly the way you want it to look.

This chapter shows you how to take a drawing from simple to spectacular. Here, you get acquainted with Flash’s selection tools—the tools you use to tell Flash which specific part of a drawing you want to change. Then you apply Flash’s editing tools from basic (copying, pasting, and moving) to advanced (scaling, rotating, stacking, grouping, and more).

You can also do more with color in Flash drawings than you saw in Chapter 2. After a quick background in color theory, this chapter covers applying color effects like brightness and transparency, and even creating your own custom colors.

Selecting Graphic Elements

With few exceptions, before you can modify an object on the stage, you first have to select the object. It’s the same in a word processor, where you have to highlight a word with your cursor before you can edit or delete it. Since Flash deals with more complex objects than words, it gives you a variety of selection tools ...