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

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Once you’ve got everything drawn and scanned, use your graphics software (or Flash, depending on your methods) to layer the individual pieces on top of the doll and size them appropriately, rotate them to fit, clean up the artwork, and erase all the surrounding white space. If you size everything to fit now, before exporting the images, it’ll save you a lot of trouble later when trying to piece everything together in Flash.

Color everything as you see fit; when you’re done, export all the pieces as individual files (e.g., dollbase.png, superherocape.png, schoolgirlsocks.png), either as transparent GIFS or PNGs. Although the file size is generally larger, I prefer to use PNGs to preserve the detailed shading and clean edges on the transparency. In the end the format doesn’t matter; all that matters is that you have images with transparent backgrounds surrounding the pieces to be assembled, so that you’ll be able to see the doll’s body around the clothing, and see the scene’s background. (If you worked in Flash, you don’t need to worry about this.)

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