Flash 8 Cookbook

1.19. Painting Shapes

Problem

You want to emulate the experience of painting, but strokes aren’t wide enough.

Solution

Use the Brush tool (B).

Discussion

The Brush tool is a freehand drawing tool. Like the Pencil tool, its behavior is affected by the smoothing settings chosen in Preferences. But unlike the Pencil tool, the Brush tool creates fills, rather than lines.

When the Brush tool is selected, the Options portion of the Tools panel displays the brush options. The Brush Size and Brush Shape options are self-explanatory, but the Brush Mode and Lock Fill options are not. Brush Mode controls how the fills painted onto the stage interact with content already on the stage in the same frame, as follows:

Paint Normal

Paints over existing content (the default mode).

Paint Fills

Paints over only fills, leaving existing strokes intact.

Paint Behind

Fills the area behind existing elements, while leaving both their strokes and fills intact.

Paint Selection

Paints over selected strokes and/or fills only, leaving all unselected content intact.

Paint Inside

Paints only within the element in which you first click, not outside.

The differences among these modes can be seen in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4. Different Brush Modes make coloring easy

See Also

Recipe 1.20, Recipe 1.28, Recipe 1.22