You can always retrace this manually using the Pencil Tool and a graphics tablet (for finer control and ease in varying line weight), but you’ll find that it takes you two or three times as long. The Pen Tool may simplify things a bit much, but it’s far faster and easier for the purposes of simple animation. Truth told, however, I really prefer doing all of my animation by hand with pencil and paper, before scanning and using Photoshop to crop, align, assemble, and color my frames in stacked layers before using Flash to assemble the individual images into an animation. That’s just me, though. If you’re dead set on doing everything in Flash, then this is the way that you’d want to consider as a base technique while discovering the method of working that fits best for you.
Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Detailed Animation Part III
By Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com Guide
We’re going to use the Pen Tool to retrace; select the tool, select a stroke color (black is usually a good default choice, though some people prefer a style where outlines are done in a darker shade of the color that the fill will be). For the fill, make sure to set it to No Fill or else any time that you close a shape, it may fill with a color that you don’t want. You can always delete it if it does, but acting preemptively will save you the trouble.
Prev
- Introduction
- Pen Tool Options I
- Pen Tool Options II
- Retracing I
- Retracing II
- Tweaking With the Subselection Tool
- Starting the Second Frame
- Second Frame II
- Conclusion and Finished Result
Explore Animation
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