Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, I review the brush tool which is underneath the geometric shapes tool. The brush tool draws brush like strokes as if you were painting. It creates special effects including effects that look like you've been doing some calligraphy. You can select a brush size and shape using the brush tool modifiers at the base of the tools panel here. Here is the brush size. Let's go with a small size here so you can see the difference. Here's the brush size and then there's a brush shape. Let's go with a larger size so you can see that shape better. There's a brush shape and there's a very different shape. Now the brush size for new strokes remains constant even when you change the magnification level for this stage. If I zoom in to 200 percent it looks bigger but those brush strokes are the same size. Here in the Properties Inspector there's a fill color for your brush and notice that you can set your alpha of the brush, too. Let's set the alpha down to about 40 percent and notice that it gets a bit transparent there. Also anything new that I draw with the brush tool will have that 40 percent transparency. You can also import a bitmap as a fill when painting with the brush tool. Check the Flash help for details on that. If you have a Wacom pressure sensitive tablet connected to your computer you can vary the width and angle of the brush stroke by using the brush tool pressure and tilt modifiers and varying the pressure on the stylus. The pressure modifier varies the width of the brush strokes when you vary the pressure on the stylus. The tilt modifier varies the angle of the brush strokes when you vary the angle of the stylus on the tablet. The tilt modifier measures the angle between the top or the eraser end of the stylus and the top north edge of the tablet. For example, if you hold the pen vertically against the tablet the tilt is 90 degrees. The pressure and tilt modifiers are both fully supported for the eraser function of the stylus. Let me show you an example of a variable width brush stroke drawn with a stylus. Here you can see that as I drew with my stylus the width of that line changed so that I have a very thick width here and very thin to start off with there. The brush tool has some unique painting modes available down here at the base of the tools panel, so let me clear my workspace here and demonstrate each of these modes. Get some work space here. So let's go ahead and click on the brush tool and let's select the first mode, the Paint Normal. This paints over lines and fills on the same layer. Let's go back also and change my opacity back to 100, or alpha back to 100 percent there. The next option is Paint Fills. This mode paints, fills in empty areas leaving lines unaffected. So it painted over the fills, but let's go ahead and do a line here with my line tool, go back and notice that it leaves the line unaffected. Paint Behind is the next option. This paints in blank areas of the stage on the same layer leaving lines and fills unaffected, so what should happen here is it should, let's go ahead and change the color, let's undo that and change the color of my fill so you can see that it's going to leave everything unaffected that's already drawn on the stage there. Next we have Paint Selection. This applies a new fill to the selection when you select a fill in the Fill Color control or the Fill box of the Property Inspector. This is the same as selecting a filled area and applying a new fill. So let's go ahead and make some selections here like so. And now let's take the pen tool and notice that it's only filling these areas that have the selection there. In other words this line here is selected but that is not. It looks like this other line is also selected. Notice that if I go outside the selection nothing is filled in. Let's go ahead and do another example. Let's delete this and let's put in some new shapes here. And now let's select part of that shape like so. Notice that only this rectangle is selected. Let's take the brush tool and brush over this area. Let's change the color, that would be helpful. I notice that all only that area that is selected that rectangle is filling in. That's probably a better example. None of this area is getting filled in. And the last painting mode for the brush tool is Paint Inside. Let's move this up here. This paints the fill in which you start a brush stroke and never paints the lines. If you start painting in an empty area, the fill doesn't effect any existing filled areas, so let's go ahead and start in this fill. Notice that it does not affect any of the lines. And again if I start painting in an empty area the fill doesn't effect any existing filled area so that's why when I start outside here it doesn't effect this area here. But if I start in a fill area it will paint in that filled area there. Again I recommend that you practice with these various modes until you get the hang of it and you can predict what will happen; what areas will be painted and what areas will not. But notice that everything I'm doing leaves the stroke unaffected, which is probably the most useful aspect of this particular Paint Inside is that you don't have to worry about over painting your strokes there. Let me now move on to the pen tool. The pen tool is probably the most complex tool here in the tools panel. So let me go over some of its more complex and confusing features in detail in the next movie.