Flash CS5.5: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Advanced Drawing and Coloring

There’s a difference between using a pencil to create stick drawings and using a pencil to create a carefully shaded portrait. Chapter 2 covered drawing basics, explaining exactly how the Pencil, Pen, Brush, Line, and Shape tools work. This chapter explains how to use the tools in a more creative and nuanced manner. In real life—whether you’re pounding out Flash animations for your boss or for your own personal website—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.

In this chapter, you’ll get more 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’ll apply Flash’s editing tools from basic (copying, pasting, and moving) to advanced (scaling, rotating, stacking, grouping, and more). You’ll 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 custom colors. The chapter wraps up with some special tools that let you create complex patterns with a click of your mouse.

Selecting Graphic Elements

With few exceptions, before you can modify an object ...