Improve your flash skills

Tips on Improving your skill
Drawing- Spend 15 minutes everyday on drawing some basic pictures. When you are getting good at drawing basic pictures, try something a little harder. Look through a magazine for some cartoon pictures. Have a look at the way these pictures have been drawn, try draw them using flash; don’t worry if the end result looks stupid, that’s the whole point of this exercise, to improve. Everyday try and draw this picture again, this will help you greatly.

Judging Colour- This is an important skill. Say for example you are looking through pictures of cars or something like that. You might see a yellow one that you like. Take a close look at the colour, figure out what shade of yellow it is, because chances are, it isn’t just the standard yellow you find in the colour panel. In the colour panel go into custom colours(when you for example click on the oval tool, open up the fill colour, up the top of the box next to the box with the red line through it, there is a circle filled with different colours. Here you can get the exact colour you need.
Each colour has a number, when you click on the fill colour tool, hold the cursor over a colour, in the box located at the top of the colour panel, there will be a list of numbers. For example, black is #000000. So remember to have a look through custom colours often, as the ones that display when you click on stroke colour or fill colour, are only basic colours.

Judging Scale- This is really easy(for most of us). Let’s say you want to draw a picture of a person holding a five dollar note; you don’t want the five dollar note to be as big as the person’s whole arm. This would be a pretty obvious mistake, but you would be surprised how many people make this mistake.
Solution: grab a five dollar note, and have a look haw big it is compared to your hand or arm. Although this was a simple example, this mistake can sometimes be easy to make, that being said, it is also easy to avoid.

Drawing a Person- One of the most common things seen in a flash movie is a person, so it doesn’t hurt to know how to draw one.
Have a look in the mirror, take in the details, have dark are your eyes, how large are they, what do your ears look like from the front and the side, what does you nose look like, take notes like these.
A common mistake when someone draws a person is the eye position. When you had a look in the mirror I bet you didn’t notice this, but you eyes are actually in the very centre of our face. It looks like they area bit above centre.
Practice drawing out each thing individually, have a look at your nose, now try drawing it out, and so on.
Don’t worry to much about the detail, this is not that important, a cartoon drawing does not need to made complicated, it needs to be kept fun. Take “South Park” for example, for those of you who know what this is, look how simple the characters are, but yet, we can still identify their characteristics easily, so just remember don’t be too fussy with the detail.


Experiment With Colour- As I just said, don’t worry about the detail too much.
This may sound like I am contradicting what I just said before in the advice about colour, but when designing you own simple designs, make the colours fun. Say for example when you draw a person don’t worry too much about getting the colour perfect, you may even want to make the person blue, be creative, a key thing in flash, creativity.