Tutorials

Drawing in Flash | Coloring in Flash

Now that you have practiced drawing in Flash, you are now ready to start coloring. Just like drawing, Flash has some smart coloring tools that makes coloring anime style easy. Be sure you have read about anime style coloring in the anime aesethic section before you start coloring.

Color Filling

To do general color filling with Flash, first select the paint bucket tool (k) paint bucket (k) . Flash has four modes for color filling: Don't Close Gaps, Close Small Gaps, Close Medium Gaps, and Close Large Gaps. The idea of Gaps is where the intelligence of Flash's toolset comes into play. Basically, Flash will recognize gaps between lines (or colored areas) and stop from filling in beyond those gaps. Don't Close Gaps is the basic paint fill mode that if you have ever used a basic paint program you know and hate. It can accidently fill your whole screen with a color if you let it. Close Small Gaps really does mean "SMALL" gaps and is great for touch up or for area with fine details. Close Medium Gaps has a good threshhold for gap size and is the one I generally use. Close Large Gaps generally detacts gaps a little too large but at the same time, not enough color is more easily remedied then over colored.

paint bucket modes

The above example just shows what happens to the same image when the paint bucket tool is used once under three of the different modes. Notice how the medium and large gap recognition smartly stops the color from filling into unwanted areas like the hair, even though in a traditional paint program (or in Don't Close Gaps or Close Small Gaps modes) it would have just painted everything. Also when the gap detection stops even when you you wanted something colored like the ear, you can easily just click in the uncolored part of the ear to fill.

Color Shading

The paint brush tool (b)

is a great painting tool. It is pressure sensitive when using a Wacom Pen Tablet, so the harder you press, the wider or fatter the brush size. Also, there are five paint brush modes: Paint Normal, Paint Fills, Paint Behind, Paint Selection, and Paint Inside. While each mode has it's specific use, the two modes I used most are Paint Normal and Paint Inside as described below.

The paint inside (or paint selection) mode is perfect for adding the additional shading tones to give dimension and depth to the artwork. When using both the paint bucket in Close Medium mode and the paint brush in Paint Inside mode, it is easy to add anime style color to your artwork like seen below.

drawing -> filled -> fully colored

So with that in mind, practice drawing and coloring in Flash and very soon I'll post a little bit on basic animation using the Flash toolset. Was this helpful? .