Fabulous Flash

I have a new favorite tool - the paintbrush tool in Flash! If you have a Wacom tablet, the paintbrush tool does a pretty good job with pressure-sensitive thick and thins while drawing. Flash 8 also has the added feature of a Smoothing setting (in the Properties panel), so you get really nice smooth clean lines.

Since we are going to be using Flash a lot more at work, we spent all of last week training. I sorta did the teaching the first three days, and then we had a real trainer come - Ryan Simmons. He taught us some great tricks for character animation. Check out his site for some fun animations, tutorials, characters you can download, etc.

The rabbit started out as one of many silly doodles while we were practicing using the different drawing and coloring tools. Then I ended up using it when we were learning some lip syncing tips. (Click on the rabbit to see the animation - you'll need Flash Player 8 if you don't have it already.)

The robot was from earlier in the week when we were trying out different motion tweens. Never got around to finishing it - I wanted to have the arms moving, and lots of other stuff, but we moved on to other things. Jim, one of my co-workers, looked over from his menacing-looking robot that ate ball bearings and said - "You live in a happy world, don't you..."

Illustration Friday: Monster

Click on the Swampy guy to go to the Monster Flipbook!

I'm actually working on a Frankenstein illo tonight, but I thought the flipbook would be more fun to post for Illustration Friday. This is for a little computer game, you can pick to build either a monster or a robot. (Those glamorous buttons are obviously temp.) So you get Robots too - extra special bonus!

Survey Says!

Finally got back the results from the character survey. We sent it to schools here in Utah, some in California, and even to one school in Japan.

Style 3 was the clear winner 2:1 over style 2. Style 1 hardly any votes.

The kids also picked natural skin tones over the wacky colors, by a landslide. (I was a little disappointed by this - I like the rainbow skin colors!)

The survey was 12 pages of questions and choices. Overall, pretty interesting to see what kids actually like vs. what we adults *think* they'll like!

Illustration Friday: Insect

My ever most favorite insect would be the fabulous Bee. Dunno why, but there ya go. I was supposed to do a little animation for the letter V, but after some whining and bribing, got to do B. I'm not going to post the movie, but basically, Bear swipes at honey, Bees swarm from hive and chase poor hungry Bear as background pans, and then after Bear runs off screen, big letter B made of Bees pans on.

There were some actual sketches buried in the photoshop files. I think I was trying to figure out a watercolor type look, that I gave up on and decided to go with what I knew since I had a tight deadline. I also found another quick sketch for figuring out how the pan would work here. Gives you an idea of sloppy I am at the start of a project.

I decided to draw the final background lines on actual paper. Since the pan was so wide, it just was a little easier to handle, plus I like the softer line you get with a pencil. I usually draw with a blue or red Colorerase pencil (I like the texture), and convert it to grayscale after scanning.

The next step is about the coolest photoshop trick ever. Open the Channels palette. At the bottom are a few icons - click on the dotted circle - this will select the WHITE. Go back to the Layers palette, make a new layer, then INVERT the selection. Then fill the selection with Black, or whatever color. This will give you your lines, in beautiful grayscale, on a transparent background.




Now that your lines are on a transparent layer, you can turn on the Preserve Transparency button (it is the little checkerboard near the top of the Layers Palette) and color and shade your lines.



When coloring this background, I had a ton of layers. I like to fill in a solid color for each different area - for example a tree trunk layer, pine tree layer, foreground grass layer, midground grass layer. I turn on the Preserve Transparency, and then shade away. Next, I go to the Line layer, and color the line to match the shading below. Then I usually have another layer above the Line layer for fixes and touchups.

The bees and the bear were drawn directly in Photoshop using default brushes. I turned on the Drop Shadow in Layer Styles on the Bee layer to make it pop a little from the background.