"Inking" in Flash

More Decodables! Here are a few pages from my latest little book - The Toy Robot. These things are all about trying to get something half-way decent-looking in as little time as possible. The finals for this one were done in Flash.

The process is pretty straightforward. I have a sketch imported from Photoshop to use as reference, and draw all the lines using the pencil tool. Then with the little ink pot tool I go and change all the line widths for thick and thins. Then I convert the whole thing from Lines to Fills (you can do this in the Modify menu), and I clean up corners and edges to make the transitions between line widths nice and smooth. Then I used the paint bucket for fills, and the paint brush for the little highlights (the robot is supposed to be Gold Foil.)





This next book is done in a similar way, but there's some photoshop work at the end. After cleaning up the black lines in Flash, I export the lines as a .png at 300dpi and open that up in Photoshop.



Since the lines are so nice and clean, I can use the magic wand tool and select the areas I want to fill in with color, then I go up to the select menu and choose expand, and expand the selection by 2 pixels, and then on a layer below the lines, I hit alt+del to fill in the color.

I wanted to spice it up a little bit without having to do much shading so I brought in some patterns I got from wallpaper samples. After making a selection (and expanding it) I go to the layer with the wallpaper, and hit the mask button (it's at the bottom of the layers palette - it's a little gray box with a white circle.) I suppose you could just reverse your selection and delete the extra wallpaper, but this way, you can unlock the mask and move the pattern around and make adjustments.



I only have these two done so far. The rest I've sort of been stalling on because it means I have to try to draw a fishing boat. Ugh.