Using Flash as a drawing tool...

[Mike the Gent]

Just wondering if anyone here used Flash as a drawing tool? I got one of those 'How To Draw Manga' books specifically dealing with Flash, and it really got me thinking. Some of the example in the book look as good as anything I've seen done in Photoshop with linework, with the added bonus that they'll scale to any size (postcard to poster) with no loss of quality whatsoever.

This is a quickie of what I've been doing:



Flash gives a nice clean line, which I like. These two portraits were traced (using a mouse!) from very rough sketchbook scans, and coloured used gradated fills and flats (as well as a bit of alpha transparency for the eye highlights).

I'm just starting out, so I'm still in need of a lot of practice. The reason for my using Flash will become apparant just as soon as the site I'm working on goes public (in a couple of months, hopefully).

Is there anyone who can offer a few Flash tips? At the moment it's taking an age to do each character, and when I get things up and running, speed will be of the essence. Any ideas how I can speed the process up?

[xadrian]

I really only use flash for menu pages, I've only once or twice done animation or drawing.

It's quick and dirty compared to PS. PS you really can't just draw lines with a line tool. It creates a new shape layer and I haven't figured out what that all means.

Flash you can draw a line, then shape it, resize it, flip it, color it, pretty easily. I would consider doing the line drawings in Flash (if you don't have a wacom or illustrator) and then coloring it in PS where you have more layer/coloring options.

What you have looks pretty cool though.

[Mike the Gent]

The main reason I'm using Flash is that vector-based illos inside a Flash movie will generally load much faster and display more consistently than PS-coloured jpegs... no jaggies or artefacts. And for what I plan to do, this is important. Wait and see