Flash Halloween Costume Dress-Up Doll I: Artwork & Setup

The Halloween theme continues, this time with something a bit more complicated than last week's pumpkin: part one of a two-part lesson on how to make a costume dress-up doll for Halloween using Flash (and, depending on your preferred methods, your graphics program of choice). If you don't feel like getting decked out yourself, no worries - your doll can try on the costumes for you; you can make as many interchangeable pieces as you'd like, and mix and match as many costumes as your imagination can conjure up. (And don't ask me just what I was thinking when I gave my girl forty-six individual parts. Time-consuming? Just a little.)

For the first part of the lesson, we're just going to get everything set up by discussing the best way to create the individual pieces of the doll, importing and arranging them in Flash, and setting up the scene. Don't worry, next week is actually the easy part: adding the ActionScripting to make the setup work.