Drawing and Editing Shapes in Flash

Anything drawn on the stage in Flash is a vector graphic -- it can be resized without losing resolution. A shape on the stage can be made up of a stroke object, a fill object, or combinations of the two. Use the drawing tools in the Tools panel (shown at left) to create and change vector shapes on stage. Many of the drawing tools have options which can be set in the Options area at the bottom of the tools panel. Others have options which can be set in the Properties panel.

When you use the pencil tool, for example, you create a stroke object. The ink bottle, line, and pen tools also produce stroke objects (though the pen tool will also create a fill object if it is used to make a closed shape). The paint bucket tool is used to create a fill object -- a filled area within a predefined stroke. The oval and rectangle tools can be used to produce strokes, fills, or both, depending on how the stroke color and fill color boxes are set.

Quirks of Flash Drawing

These are some of the quirks of drawing with Flash that make it different from other graphics editing programs and sometimes easier to use to good effect

1. Pieces of the stroke on an object are independently editable



2. If a piece of stroke is drawn, copied, or dragged so that it intersects other strokes, once it has been unselected, the pieces of stroke between and outside the intersections will be individually editable, and will divide up the previous area into new, individually editable pieces.



3. Similarly, if a fill shape (a) is placed so that it overlaps a portion of another shape (b) in the same layer, it will erase the overlapped portion of b once it (a) has been unselected. When a is selected again and moved, there will be a 'hole' in b in the overlapped shape. This can be useful for cutting shapes out of the middle or edges of other shapes, as pictured below (a=star, b=oval). To keep it from happening, make the shapes in different layers.



4. If the select tool is moused over an UNSELECTED piece of stroke or the edge of a fill until the cursor changes, it can be used to click and drag that piece of stroke or fill into a new shape. This is a nice way to add a bit --or a lot-- of irregularity to a shape, to "fix" something not quite right, or even as a general drawing technique. Many Flash cartoonists who draw in Flash (as opposed to importing from another graphics editing program) recommend the combination of pen tool and this drag-n-bend method as the easiest way to create any needed shape.



5. If the select tool is moused over a piece of stroke or the edge of a fill until the cursor changes, option-click-and-dragging (PC: ctrl-click-and-dragging) will add a new anchor point to that edge and drag it to the new location

Tool Notes

The tools are described in detail in the Flash help; here are some reminder notes:

Objects on stage can be selected by:

• choosing the Select tool and double-clicking the fill (to get both fill and stroke), and then shift-double-clicking to select other fill-and-stroke objects, or
• dragging around the object(s) with the select tool, or
• drawing around the object(s) with the lasso

With the pen tool selected, the following can be done to a shape on stage:

• Click a shape to show its anchor points
• Click a curve point to convert it to a a corner point
• Click along a curve segment to add an anchor point (for some reason, Flash won't let you add a point to a straight line segment like this)
• Click a corner point once (when the cursor shows a "-") to delete it
• Click a curve point twice to delete it (once to convert it to a corner point and again to delete it)

The subselect tool (open arrow) can also be used to move anchor points:

• To move an anchor point: Drag the point with the Subselection tool.
• To nudge an anchor point or points: Select the point or points with the Subselection tool and use the arrow keys to move the point or points (or shift-arrow keys to move in larger increments).
• To convert a corner point to a curve point: Use the Subselection tool to select the point, then Option-drag (PC: alt-drag) the point to place the tangent handles.
• To delete a corner or curve point, select it with the Subselection tool and hit the Del key.

The rectangle and oval tools are for dragging out a rectangle, square (shift-drag), oval, circle (shift-drag), polygon, or star on stage, using the currently selected fill and stroke colors. Use option-drag (PC: alt-drag) to drag from the center.

The paint bucket tool is used to set the fill color to a solid or gradient. (If you click inside a stroke with the paint bucket and it won't fill, there are probably gaps in the stroke. Try turning on the "close large gaps" option.) The ink bottle tool is used to add a stroke around an object -- select it and click near the edge of a fill object to add a stroke to it.