Flash 101 - Part 1: The Hammer and The Chisel

Watching Paint Dry

As you've already seen, Flash comes with two colour pickers, one for the fill colour, and the other for the stroke colour. The Paint Bucket tool, accessed via the keyboard shortcut K, allows you to fill selected shapes with the currently selected fill colour.

To fill a specified object, you need to first select the colour in the fill colour picker, and then click on the object with the Paint Bucket tool - Flash will automatically fill it with the colour selected (you can also control fills from the Fill tab of the Window->Panels->Stroke panel).

You can also use a gradient fill - you'll find a bunch of them at the bottom of the fill colour picker.

Now try clicking on different parts of the filled object -you'll see that Flash changes the angle of the gradient depending on where you click.

To change the fill colour of a specified object, simply select a new fill colour in the colour picker and apply the Paint Bucket tool to the selected object.

The Paint Bucket tool comes with a "gap size" modifier which allows you to close open objects with a fill. You can decide whether "small", "medium" or "large" gaps are to be closed.

And just as the Paint Bucket tool allows you to control the fill of an object, there's also an Ink Bottle tool designed to control the outline of an object. You can activate it with the keyboard shortcut S.

The Ink Bottle tool allows you to control the style and colour of an object outline. All the important options are hidden in the Window->Panels->Stroke panel, on the Stroke tab - you can choose from a variety of different styles, modify the thickness of the outline, and select an appropriate colour. Once you're done, simply click an object with the Ink Bottle tool active, and Flash will apply your settings to the object.

Picasso Beware!

In case clean lines aren't your thing, Flash also makes provision for the Picasso in you with its Brush tool, which allows you to draw brush strokes with your mouse. The Brush tool can be activated with the keyboard shortcut B.

Once you've selected the Brush tool, you should also select a fill colour from the colour picker below the tool set - this is the colour in which your brush strokes will appear. This is also a good time to select brush type and size modifiers from the options available.

All done? You can paint with the Brush tool just as you would draw with the Pencil tool - drag the mouse pointer while holding down the mouse button.

One of the Brush tool's most powerful features is its ability to selectively paint areas of your images. This power comes to you courtesy of the "brush mode" modifier, which allows you to work in:

• "normal" mode (also known as "paint over everything" mode);
• "paint inside" mode (which constrains brush strokes to a specific area);
• "paint behind" mode (which constrains brush strokes to the empty area behind an object, leaving the object unaffected);
• or "paint fills" mode (which paints both filled and empty areas and leaves lines unaffected).

Copyright Melonfire, 2000. All rights reserved.