Ellie's Flash Booklet (WOAH! WORDS!)

I felt like giving people a good look at how I do my cartoons

Usually, whenever I draw, I mainly use Flash to do it all

Whenever I open flash, I click on New Flash Document and open up a new file (Mainly Actionscript 2.0). Before I do any animation, I go up to the timeline, and change the height of it to "Short" (I work on a pretty small monitor, since I use a laptop) which gives me more space on the timeline. I usually keep my smoothing at 50 (like a fool) and I also use mainly the brush tool to do all of my drawing (with pen pressure, sometimes) and I also use flash to do pictures for websites and whatnot. (I animate at both 24fps and 800x450)

I usually make a storyboard with the onion skin tool, and making the next actions on a new keyframe (f6 for normal keyframe, or f7 for blank keyframe) and drawing their next actions. I also use the onion skinning for the storyboard and whatnot. When I wanna try and make it well-paced, I usually go to the keyframes, and extend them out using f5 (make new frame). I also add in inbetweens to make it feel more smooth and clean. I will also use easing in my stuff, which is when a pose goes to another, except it gets slower towards the end.

Whenever I do line art, I draw out the characters and group certain parts so that they don't seem way too inconsistent to me. I also use the smooth and straighten tools for whenever some lines look strange to me. Another thing I do, is mainly draw out my character refs so that I could use them later on. The way I use them as refs, is by converting them to symbols and taking the library panel, clicking on the symbol where the design of the character is, and drag the border between the preview and the library to make it look clearer.

Whenever I do the shading, I use the pencil tool (mainly on smooth or ink) and I draw where I want the shading to be (the pencil strokes won't harm the drawing itself, so don't worry). I use the color panel and make the color I selected in the shading area darker, so that it stands out (I add in a little more blue, green, or red onto the shaded color.

For finalizing my project, I go to the properties and change the audio settings from MP3, and 16 kbps to ADPCM, 44 kbps, and 5 bits. Also, a little tip for when you animate with sound. Make sure the sound is on stream by going to the properties, and clicking on sound, and changing it from event to stream.

And there is my attempt at explaining how I animate