Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, I review the Pen tool. The Pen tool creates more complex shapes by combining both straight and curve lines in the same shape. You create straight lines by simply clicking on the stage. Curved lines are created by clicking and dragging. The shapes created with the Pen tool consists of paths, which you can see in black, anchor points, which are these green squares, and tangents handles, which are these handles that come out of the curved line segments. Use the Selection tool to select the line, and then the Sub-selection tool to work with these tangent handles. You can see the tangent handles here in black, those are the black circles. If you've used other vector based drawing programs such as Free Hand or Adobe Illustrator, you'll be instantly comfortable with the Pen tool in Flash, because it works the same way. If you haven't used a Pen tool before in any program, it can take some getting used to. It'll probably require a good deal of practice on your part before you become real comfortable with it. One of the things that will take a little bit of getting used to, let me delete this whole shape here and start over again, is getting control over the curved line segments. The straight line segments are pretty straightforward, but the curve line segments which I create by clicking and dragging on the mouse take a little bit of getting used to. One exercise that I do with my students is to have them try to mimic the shape of a wave, an ocean wave, draw several of these using various combinations of straight and curved line segments by clicking to create the straight line segments and clicking and dragging to create the curved line segments. So inevitably you'll need to use the sub-selection tool to modify these nodes which I'll be covering in more detail in the next section of the tutorial. So use the Pen tool to draw precise paths as straight lines or smooth flowing curves, and also convert curved to straight lines and the reverse, and display points on the lines that you create with other Flash drawing tools such as the Pencil, Brush, Line, Oval, or Rectangle tools to then adjust those lines. The pen tool provides feedback about its current drawing state. It has quite a few drawing states and it provides feedback by displaying different pointers. Here, this is the Initial Anchor Point pointer. This is the first pointer you'll see when you select the Pen tool. It indicates that the next mouse click on the stage will create an initial anchor point right here, which is the beginning of a new path. All new paths begin with an initial anchor point. Any existing drawing paths are then terminated. Notice that this drawing path has been terminated. This pointer is a Sequential Anchor Point pointer. This indicates that the next mouse click will create an anchor point with a line extending back to the previous anchor point. This pointer is displayed during the creation of all user defined anchor points except the initial anchor point of the path. Here is another pointer indicator, this open circle indicates that I'm going to close that path there so that I've completely filled up that object. Notice that when I've done that I get the Initial Anchor Point icon there that indicates that I can create another line segment. So there's again the same zero that I saw there. Now the negative right there indicates that I'm going to delete that point. Notice that if I move my cursor over an existing anchor point I get that negative sign which means that I'm deleting that point, like so. There's an interesting one there. That little carrot sign indicates that I'm going to be converting that curved line segment into a straight line segment. The plus that you see right there indicates that I'm going to add an anchor point to the line. And again the negative is deleting. So there's various clues that Flash will give you to tell you what's going on with the Pen tool, and you'll want to pay close attention to what it's telling you is happening. I'll be talking more about the various feedback that the Pen tool gives you when you're reworking your lines in the next section of the course on modifying Flash graphics. But for now, go ahead and practice drawing or creating shapes with the Pen tool. Again I recommend trying to draw out some kind of shape such as these waves, something that combines both curved line segments and straight line segments, so you get the hang of how this tool works. Again, if you used this type of tool in Illustrator or Free Hand, then this tool will be pretty familiar to you, so you can quickly refresh some of the nuances in Flash. Notice that's not a very good wave right there, so what would be involved here is taking the Sub-selection tool and modifying the shape of that wave there. But that'll be the topic of the next section. Let me now move onto the next movie, and cover one of the more important tools here in the tool panel, and that's the Text tool.