Lab 2 : Using Line/Pencil/Brush tool, Ink bottle and Paint Bucket Tool.

On the extreme right on the menu, you will find the various drawing tools

The line tool is looks like this,

when you click on the line tool and draw on stage you can go any direction, but if you want to draw a square lets say, you can draw a straight line downwards, you will see that by default the snap tool is selected and the line will snap in place, when it is perfectly straight, like wise to the right, up and left you will join the first point, you can draw a 45 degree line, and it will snap in place. This is a very important drawing tool in flash CS4.

The same way you can draw with pencil tool, when clicked on the pencil tool which looks like this below,


You will see that the property setting are just a stroke color, you can draw a zig zag on stage and notice that you can only select a color which is of stroke, and may not give you the option of the fill color.
In the option menu box you have two options like this below


The top one is a smooth curve and the bottom one is a straight line, assuming you have drawn a zig zag on stage with a color red, selecting the drawing on stage, as you click on the smooth button the shape of the zig zag will smoothen, and the other straight button works differently than the smooth button, when selected the drawing, and clicked on the straight line, it will straighten the line to a virtual straight line running downwards.

The next tool is the brush tool, which looks like the one below,

As you click on the brush tool, you will find that in your properties panel, you have only a fill color and not a stroke, this tool works very much like the pencil tool, with the smooth option tool and the straight option tool working with the brush tool very similarly like the way it works with pencil tool.

Another important tool is the pen tool, this tool looks like this below

As you take the pen tool to the stage you will find that it make a dot with a florescent green, and once you release your mouse and make the second mark on stage, you will find a second point, and the first and second connect, this will happen till you finish all your drawings on stage and touch the start point, when pressed escape you will find the shape you drew, and accordingly fill the color of your choice, this pen tool will draw straight lines, if you want curved strokes, you can simply drag the mouse with the cursor moving either ways and then connecting the points to the starting point.

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On the extreme right of the screen in flash CS4, in the main menu you will notice the paint bucket tool,

at the right bottom of this tool, you will see a triangle, when you click on this triangle you will get the ink bottle tool, Now lets just draw a circle with no stroke on the stage, so select a color, lets say red,  and turn the stroke off and draw a circle on stage, now draw another circle with no fill and only a stroke color selected, say blue on stage, lets say you have something like this on stage,

You can click on the ink bottle tool as shown in figure 1, select a color, lets say black and click on the red circle drawn, you will get a black stroke on the red circle drawn, similarly click on the paint bucket tool, select a red green fill and click on the blue circle drawn, you will find the blue circle with green fill in it, like you see below.

This is the difference between paint bucket tool and ink bottle tool.