Flash Drawing Basics
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by Paul Heslep
So
you want to be an artist
No two artists are alike.
You may not consider yourself an artist at all, but if you will be the one doing
the drawing and painting for your Flash movie, then you are an artist. The importance
of making this distinction is that I may outline some methods for drawing and
painting, but that does not assume that you will use these methods. I have developed
my own style for creating images, and you will likely do the same. The important
thing is to know what tools you have in your toolbar, and how they can be used.
If you have not already done so, please review the Introduction
to the Flash Interface, to familiarize yourself with the various tools that
are available, and what their names are.
There are seven tools
that you will use more than any others when creating artwork in Flash. These are
the Arrow, the Paintbrush, the Pencil, the Paint Bucket, the Ink Bottle, the Oval,
and the Square. These are basic tools, but have some interesting abilities available
as options in the lower half of the toolbar when a particular tool is selected.
We will explore each of these seven tools in a moment, but first lets discuss
the vector format of Flash.
Vector
vs. Bitmap
Vector based drawing applications such as Flash, Freehand,
and Illustrator register the shapes you draw as a mathematical formula, meaning
that a curving line would be recorded by a vector program as: POINT 1=10X, 10Y;
POINT 2=20X, 20Y; CURVE=4+3^2; STROKE=2, BLACK.
Bitmap based drawing applications
such as Photoshop register the shapes you draw as points on a grid, meaning that
the same curving line would be recorded by a bitmap application as: SQUARE X1,Y1
= NONE; SQUARE X2,Y1 = NONE; SQUARE X3,Y1 = NONE (this format continues for 46,656
pixels for the image sample below). The bitmap application must account for the
content of each pixel on the canvas, whether that pixel has content, and if so,
what color that pixel is. A more graphic demonstration can be found below.
Image A was created in Photoshop and magnified to
1600 percent.
Image B was created in Illustrator and magnified
to 1600 percent.
Notice that under high magnification, Image
A from Photoshop shows us each individual pixel, while Image B from Illustrator
keeps the same smooth curve no matter what magnification is used.
The
important part of learning this is to understand the benefits of using Vectors,
as well as knowing their limitations. The bitmap from the above example requires
3 kilobytes worth of information to save as a .gif, due to each and every pixel
being accounted for. The vector version of the same circle requires less than
100 bytes of information. The lesson here is to avoid using bitmaps in Flash if
at all possible They will make your movie larger than necessary, and Flash must
perform massive calculations to allow a bitmap to be animated. There are a few
instances where bitmaps must be used, but do so only if you have no choice.
