Subtitles of the Movie

In this section of the course I review the techniques you'll need to learn in order to create simple graphics within the Flash CS3 program itself. Flash CS3 has a powerful set of drawing and color tools over here in the toolbar to help you create simple to complex artwork for your projects. There are a lot of advantages to creating the artwork here inside of Flash itself instead of working on the objects in a program like illustrator or Photoshop and then importing those objects into Flash. These objects will be smaller, they'll be easier to edit, you'll also be able to apply more of Flash's various tools and techniques to add interactivity and other types of advanced features to these objects. Here I will demonstrate the basic use of many of the tools over here in the toolbar. I'll also review Flash's two drawing models, the object drawing model and the merge drawing model. I'll explain how they differ and when each is most useful. Although many of Flash's graphics creation tools may be familiar to you from other programs, you'll find that some of the tools over here are rather unique in addition to learning how each of these drawing tools behaves and how they work. You'll need to understand the difference between fills, strokes, lines and shapes; these differences can be confusing because the interface refers to both lines and strokes as well as the Flash documentation. So to help you I'll be using a lot of examples in this section and the next to give you a solid grounding of these fundamental Flash concepts. To clear up any potential confusion I generated this graphic summarizing these terms, create line drawings with a pencil, pen and line tools. Create strokes or outlines with the rectangle and oval tools or the primitive rectangle and primitive oval tools or the poleystar, lines and strokes are independent of fills. And you can modify them using the ink bottle, the color and tool modifiers in the tool bar, the color mixer panel or using the stroke color in the properties inspector. Create fills with the brush and pain bucket tools. You can create fills without strokes as you can see from this example right here. You can modify fills using the paint bucket, the color and tool modifier in the toolbar, the color mixer panel or using the properties inspector. Attach strokes and lines to fills with the ink bottle, modify them using the ink bottle the color and tool modifiers in the toolbar, the color mixer panel or using the properties inspector. Flash CS3 refers to strokes, lines, fills or combination there of as shapes, shapes appear as dotted meshes on the stage and displays the word drawing object in the properties inspector. Let me now move on and give you a little bit more over view in theory about how the Flash drawing tools work including movies on lines and strokes and fills and a separate movie about the object verses the merged drawing models.