Flash CS4 Brush Tool - Flash and Animation

In this tutorial, we will be drawing with the Brush tool in Flash^R CS4. With your choice of brush sizes and shapes (tips), you can create a great freehand drawing with just a little practice. Let’s draw a simple flower using just brush strokes of varying lengths.

Open Flash CS4 and begin a new project.
Rename Layer1 to “Background” and lock this layer.

Because we will eventually be using masks to create an animation of this flower growing, we will need to decide how the flower will grow in our animation before we begin to draw. In the example project, I planned to begin the animation with the first mask revealing the stem of the flower. Therefore I will draw the stem on its own layer.
Create a new layer and name it “Stem”.
Click on the Brush tool in the Tools panel.
In the Properties panel, set the Fill to a green color. I chose #336666. Also, set the Smoothing to 100.
In the Tools panel, set the Brush Shape to the first in the list and set the Brush Size to the second in the list.
On Frame 1 of the Stem layer, draw a curved line from the bottom of the stage to about 3/4 the height of the stage.

The next section of the flower that we will animate is the bottom leaves. These are long leaves that follow the same direction as the stem. Because we will need to animated these leaves together, we will draw them on their own layer.
Add a new layer to the Timeline and name it “Leaves”.
Using the same color and Brush settings, draw four leaves – two on each side of the stem.

The third section to be animated will be the flower pedals. We will need to change colors for the Brush tool before we begin to draw the pedals. I’ve decided to use a purple color #990099.
Add a new layer and name it “Flower”.
Click on the Fill color box in the Properties panel and choose a color for your flower. Also, change the Brush Shape to one of the slanted lines.
Draw the flower pedals around the top of the stem.

The last section of the flower to be animated are the colorful leaves at the bottom. These leaves are the same color as the flower pedals.
Add a new layer and name it “Leaves2”.
Switch back to the first Brush shape and draw a few colorful leaves at the bottom of the stage.
Save your fla file and we will learn how to animated the growing flower with masks in the next tutorial.

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