Colors can be a very important part of all of our animated art work and so what we want to do is take a little bit of a closer look at selecting color and storing colors in our program as well as using them.
Now, to do that I have got a little graphic that we can start with, it is called “The Garden 2,” and you should find it in your Lesson 6 folder if you have copied those to your desktop files. It will just give us some graphics that we can use to select different colors and try out some different application techniques of them. It is kind of a flat graphics so while we are working on cleaning this one up and giving it a little bit more life and depth as we go along here. Before we start really changing too many things, I want to just go over color selection itself. Now we have been sticking to a very simple model for color selection. We wanted to change our stroke and our fill colors. We are just popping down the menu and using one of the available colors in this watch menu. But by no means, these are the only colors available in Flash. We have got the entire range of all 24 different colors to use and we are just going to use a couple of different methods to go about selecting them and setting them in our different areas.
Now, the first thing that I will point out is we have already seen this a little bit and that is if I select some object, we can see that the property menu will pop out and show us some properties of the object that we have got selected. It will give me different properties based on whether I have a fill as I have in this cloud shape or whether I have a stroke, let me grab some of the grass stroke here and you can see some more of the property become available. But the first this I will point at is the color selector down here. Now these color selectors over here refer generally to setting colors. They will be used to apply a color to a specific object or when we are using a tool to set the color of the object that we are drawing. Property window is going to show us the colors and settings of the currently selected property. We will have a little bit of a difference there. Now, one of the first places we are going to go to for advanced color selection is going to be the color palette. I just happen to have that in my panel’s list over at the side. If you do not have this up, you can find it under the windows pull down menu and it should be there under color mixer.
You will notice first of all, you basically have a duplicate of our selection tools right here. These tools will mirror the other ones on our tool palette side. Notice if I select the color for stroke, it is going to be mimicked up in the window. I might as well go ahead and point out some of these tools underneath here. This can be great for making very quick selections. These are more reserved for resetting that palette if you want to think of it that way. For instance, I can click on this tool to quickly set stroke to black and our fill color to white. This is kind of considered default colors as we set them in there. Now for few of our objects, the rectangle tool with the oval tool where we are actually make strokes and fills from the objects, we had done a no stroke or no fill setting by using the red flash in the appropriate pull down panel. This button in the middle is a quick selector so you do not have to pull the panel down in order to do that. I can just click on the red flash here and it will set it for whatever is the active color at the time.
Our last icon we can use is a tool setting. It will allow us to take the current settings of the stroke and the fill colors and switch them. So if I just click on that, I will get the fill color dropped into the stroke and vice versa as we can switch them back and forth. And you can see that those same tools are mimicked over here in the color mix of panels as well. The coloring mixer panel is my first choice for where I am going to select additional colors beyond those that we have seen in the pull down menu palette. I have got a standard hue selector here with some variations on saturation goi
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