Brian J's Project 1

I started with a photo of an actual Picasso Triggerfish that I found on the web. I took that photo and dragged it onto the Flash stage as a layer. Then I added a new layer for my drawing. I did a really rough trace of the fish shape using the pen tool over the imported photo to give me the shape of the fish, then adjusted it later using the subselection tool and pencil tool to fine tune it. I experimented with that various drawing modes using the paint brush to color the body of the fish. I mainly used the merge drawing mode, because I wanted to be able to paint over things, and give it an overall "painterly" look, although I experimented with the others in various places. I added a couple of shape primitives for the eye, and I framed it using another primitive. For the water, seaweed, and ground I used the paintbrush using a combination of painting in normal mode, and painting behind. Then of course I used the text tool with a custom gradient for the title. Just for kicks I did the text in its own layer, so that I could do some animation of it separately if I wanted to later.

I found that the "tracing" technique worked really well, and gave me a quick and accurate shape to work from. I also enjoyed using the brush tool in merge drawing mode for a painterly effect. I cranked up the smoothness value of my brush so that I could be a bit "sloppy" but still have it look good. The paint behind mode is a very new concept to me, but I found it to be very useful. You just need to plan ahead a bit.