Flash Vector Illustration Walkthrough (Part 1)

Vector Illustration is often quite hard to wrap ye old noggin around sometimes - especially for beginners. Whilst most Illustrators tend to use the larger more orthodox illustration applications such as Adobe Illustrator and Freehand , I choose to use Flash because of its simple, and animation friendly drawing tools. I plan to write a few of these, but first I want to lay down the basics before I even write about shading and tone, so yeaaaaaaaah! Of course, everything that appears within this tutorial can easily be accomplished using alternative packages - I will walk through my general work flow for the sake of the tutorial, and be covering the process used to create the illustration above.

Get the right gear!

Ok enough jibber jabbering. For this tutorial, all you will need is Flash, and a drawing to work from. I recommend a scanned rough, or something sketched up in Photoshop or Alias Sketchbook (what I usually use). I will mention that a drawing tablet is definitely desirable in order to achieve accurate line work, and also make the process quicker (tablets are ninja quick).

Planning it out

Before you even pop open Flash you should always rough out the concept first. Even if it is simple blocks and elements to establish the composition. The more messing around you do at the start determines how much tweaking and tedious refinements you will need to apply to your final product. Often, I will really loosely draw elements a few times until I get the general feel of them, and start layering the roughs on top of each other until I have a nice and balanced form. In the octopus sketch above, it is a little more detailed than I usually would attack a drawing, because it was being used for a project. Nevertheless, if you detail your image in the beginning, it means you will not have to worry about adding and touching your vectored line work when colouring and shading.

Lining it up

Ok, now you can pop open Flash!

• Create a new document and set it to something nice and big (1280×1024 pixels is a good start).

• Create a new layer and add your rough sketch to it. Scale it so it fits the size of the stage fairly well. Set the layer to guide mode, and lock it.

• Again, create a layer, but this time add it above the first and create a blank keyframe.

You should now have a layer configuration which looks something like the above picture.

Sweet. Now that you are all setup, grab the line tool ( Shortcut is “N”) and set it to a colour that is completely different to the original line. I usually sketch in blue animator’s pencil, so I use red to make it easy to distinguish the vector lines from the rough. A line stroke of 1 pixel works great - so stick to that width.

As far as the lining technique goes, it is fairly straight forward.

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