Flash CS3: The Drawing Tools Pt.3

This allows us to toggle between standard or object drawing mode. For now, I want you to leave this unchecked. And let’s go over to the stage and click and drag in the center to draw a new rectangle.

Now from here go ahead and grab your selection tool to the top of the toolbar. And click once in the center of the shape and you will notice that just the fill becomes selected. From here you can click and drag and actually separate the fill from the stroke. To return it back to the center go ahead and choose Edit — Undo Move, that will bring us back to where you started. Now go ahead and double click the outer edge of the shape and this is gonna select the stroke by itself and leave the fill untouched. And similar to what you did with the fill you can click and drag and actually move the stroke and separate it from the fill.

Again choose Edit— Undo Move, to return it back. What you can also do with shapes drawn in this mode is you can tear them apart. We can do this by partially selecting the shape by drawing a marquee around the section that we want. Click and drag a marquee around half of the rectangle and you will see that only half of it becomes selected. And from this point I can click and drag on the selected area to separate it from the rest of the rectangle. So this is pretty cool because in this mode Flash lets us tear apart objects like clay, which gives us a lot of illustration flexibility.

Now to explore object-drawing mode, again let’s select the rectangle tool from the toolbar. This time at the very bottom of the toolbar, let’s click that object-drawing icon and select it and activate object-drawing mode for this tool. Now click, drag, draw a new rectangle at the top of the stage above the old one, go to the top of the toolbar, and grab your selection tool. If you click once on the center of the shape you will know the entire shape becomes selected. If we click once on the outer edge of the shape, again the entire shape is selected.

Shapes drawn and object drawing mode group the stroke and the fill together so they cannot be separated. Let’s go ahead and try and select part of this new shape. Click and drag and draw a marquee around half of the shape and you will see the same thing, the entire shape becomes selected. So, shapes drawn and object drawing mode are actually grouped together as one single object, they can’t be torn apart. In order to take a shape that has been drawn in this mode and break it apart so that we can separate the stroke from the fill or do partial selections again, we are gonna have to select it and break it out of the drawing object by choosing Modify– Break Apart.

Go ahead and select the rectangle choose Modify– Break apart and you will see this command breaks the shape out of the drawing object and back down to its raw form. Once again, we can select either the fill or the stroke or a portion of the shape to tear it apart again.

In case you didn’t see the video in part 1 of this series… here it is again.

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