Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide

2. Creating Simple Graphics

About Strokes and Fills

What do stroke and fill mean? A stroke is an outline, and a fill is a solid area of color. Picture a coloring book, with black lines creating the pictures: Those lines are strokes. When you fill in the areas outlined by strokes—say, with crayon—that colorful area is the fill. In a coloring book, you start with an outline and create the fill inside it. In Flash, you can work the other way around—start with a solid shape and then create the outline as a separate element.

Flash’s oval, rectangle, and polystar tools allow you to create an element that’s just a stroke or just a fill, or to create the stroke and fill elements simultaneously. The line tool, as you might guess, creates only strokes. ...