PE6_Flash

Continuing with my tutorials, I had some fun with the paintbrush tool and with painting inside shapes. I know it looks like a kindergartener did it, but I guess that's where I am with Flash.

There was a way to make curves with the pen tool called making "Bezier curves". What a humbling experience! As Todd quickly created a perfect cactus using that tool, I was left practicing. He showed how much better the Bezier tool created smooth lines, as opposed to the basic pen tool using lines. I'm totally Bezier challenged, and I'll probably stick with the plain pen tool for now if this is the result:

Now that I've finished the basic shape manipulation tutorials, I decided to look for a tutorial that would put me through an animation. I chose one for vines that appear to be growing on the screen. The first step was to get some free vector artwork. That's artwork made with curved lines rather than pixels, which are used for bitmap artwork. I went to www.vector4free.com and found one called Floral Ornaments which is available through Creative Commons. I'm following step by step along with the tutorial, and I managed to import the artwork, resize it, and turn it into a raw image. I then had to open thetimeline and create an artwork layer and a mask layer. Here's where I am so far:

The next step is to put the artwork inside the green oval, and I'm sure I'll find out why just as soon as I return to the video.

This is actually exciting stuff, but I'm just doing "monkey see, monkey do" at this point. I am familiar enough with the tools and menus now that I can find what is being shown and do it along with the tutorial. I'm going to still work with my tech director, because I want to understand what I'm doing so I can be ready for our work in course 6. I think this program can do some very amazing things, but I've just scratched the surface. It will take much more hands-on practice before I can say that I'm proficient at a very basic level. So I've learned a lot, but I have a long way to go.