Project 1: Drawing Tools - Flash Interface

Hi All,
This is Amy and I chose robot lounge singers for my subject. For this project I utilized the three types of drawing objects to create the robot shapes. The main robot, “Jimmy”, was mainly built using the object drawing mode and stacking rectangles. The “She-bots” were merge shapes that I joined and then selected portions of and separated. The rings and half circles were created using the oval primitive tool.

The images I used the pen tool for were the triangular bow tie shapes and the microphone cord. The cord was initially created with the pencil tool with the smooth option. Then I used the Bezier curves to modify the points to get it going in the right direction. I found it challenging to join the points to make a complete object and found it helpful to zoom in to 400 percent to accomplish that.

The text behaves slightly differently than in other Adobe projects and I felt like there was not as much control although I did appreciate the ability to break apart the characters. I used static text however mistakenly used a font which I thought was standard on a PC. Consequently it defaults to a system font when opened on a PC. I would be curious to know if there is a “convert to outlines” option in Flash or if that needs to be done in another program.

Regarding the gradients – I used both linear and radial gradients to fill the robot shapes. For the radial gradients I used the gradient transform tool to modify the focal point of the highlight. I also used Kuler to come up with a color scheme. It’s fantastic to be able to type in “robot” and have color options pop up. The hexidecimal colors I used were (teal) #2B95BO, (pink) #EOB4B4, (lt. blue) #A7C7C7 and (green) #669966.

The spray tool was used to create the small dot pattern in the background and the polygon tool with the star settings were for the larger stars. The brush tool with the paint behind settings and a square brush tip was used for the highlighting behind the text. Finally I used the group and free-transform tools to rotate the “She-bots”. Although this project had a steep learning curve, I thought it was a great way to learn how to work with these tools.