I’ve been using Flash to draw for ages and ages, so my Illustrator skills were getting a bit rusty. To rectify this, I thought I’d restrain myself to Illustrator for a while and freshen up on ‘dem ke-razy beziers and pathfinder doodads. It was frustrating going for a couple of hours (um, where’s expand fill? Psychotic bezier handles! Can’t I just grab a line and re-shape it?), but…hey, I’m gradually remembering. It’s definitely more versatile than Flash, although I need to un-learn all those little Flash tricks I’ve been using for years to make stuff look pretty. (Is there any such thing as expand/contract ‘fill’ - well, object - in Illustrator? Free transform obviously doesn’t cut it for scaling anything but regular shapes.)

Yes, there’s a wee bit of girly overload on this stuff, but I’m a sucker for these sort of colour palettes (that said, they’re a bit more vibrant in CMYK than these slightly washed out RGB jpegs).

Now I have a sudden urge to go bake cupcakes…

I have my second screen-printing class tomorrow evening, and I’ve quickly vectorized a sketch as something to test print:

I doubt I’ll get all four colours done tomorrow, but I’m looking forward to trying! This definitely won’t be my final image - I knocked it up fairly quickly and it’s pretty sparse, but I’d like to see how a vector illustration style translates onto ink and paper. I have some more evening classes and an entire Saturday workshop to go, so I’d like to work on something entirely shiny and new for my edition. I’ll have to run into town early tomorrow to get my plates printed onto acetate; I’ve run out of ink-jet transparencies but, hey, they’re not quite opaque enough for creating crackin’ exposures from anyway.

I am absolutely loving screen-printing. Okay, so it’s incredibly messy and expensive and long-winded and tiring, but…I think I’m addicted. I came home from my first class with ink on my hands and a grin on my face. I’ll definitely set something up at home, although I’ve probably been spoiled by all the lovelylovely professional equipment we’ve been using.

After much code-wrangling, I’ve finally launched my new portfolio site:

I’d previously used Wordpress for content management purposes, but moved over to Expression Engine for this project. Wordpress is a great tool, but I found that I had to hack it to pieces and install multiple plug-ins to coerce it into meeting my demands. Fair enough, as I was trying to shoehorn entire sites into the frame of a capable blogging application. No, what I needed was a robust CMS, so I decided to invest some time and switch to the much lauded Expression Engine. Being used to Wordpress and Movable Type, I was scratching my head for a few hours but, once I got the hang of the architecture and terminology, I fell in love with the thing. I’ll write a post outlining how I constructed the site in EE at a later date, but Veerle’s blog is a good place to browse for tips on EE implementation.

There are still a few tweaks I need to make to the design, and I was thinking of implementing SiFR for the headings and titles - it’s a lot more scalable and accessible than creating a new image for every project I add or update. That said, I needed to get the site up quickly for various reasons, so I’m quite happy with it for now. I’m trying to resist the urge to fiddle some more!

Please feel free to let me know what you think, and if you discover any typos or problems in your particular browser/platform combination – I’d appreciate it!

Speaking of Flash, I’m in the midst of a re-work of my portfolio, so I thought I’d post a couple of old Flash layouts that I stumbled across. Both pieces were completely drawn in Flash - the first was a background concept for the menu screen of a CD-Rom game, and the second is just a digital doodle from those down-time moments waiting for things to render and screens to update. Flash is great for quick vector sketches - I must do more.

A lot of people rag on Flash for vector drawing in favour of Illustrator and, yes, if your aim is artwork for print, then Illustrator is almost certainly your guy. However, if your final output is Flash and/or your artwork needs to be animated in Flash, then why not draw in Flash to start with? The tools are simple and there are no Illustrator-to-Flash conversion issues (taking gradients from Illustrator to Flash is generally no fun). I’ve a fair amount of experience drawing in Flash: my last full-time job at an educational multimedia company was about 80% production in Flash, Flash, Flash. At the beginning, most of our work had to be optimised for a 56k connection, which, as you can imagine, resulted in a whole heap o’tweaking to reduce file-sizes.

With that in mind, here are some very quick tips to make with the pretty in Flash, yet still keep file-sizes minimal:

Group and re-use items: drawing flat on the stage is all well and good, but every intersection will add to your file-size, as well as making your image a complete pain in the behind to edit at a later date. To combat this, use layers and sensible grouping, as well as re-use of symbols where appropriate.

Not everything has to be a symbol: Honestly! If an object is not going to be re-used or animated, then there’s probably no reason to make it a symbol. Movieclips are also slightly bigger than graphic symbols. Symbols add file-size - only a small amount, true, but it all adds up.

Use minimal points/vertices: the line tool is your friend, the brush tool is your enemy, trace bitmap is heresy (for optimisation, that is. I’m all in favour of mucking about with the brush tool and a Wacom if file-size isn’t an issue). Use ‘Optimise Curves’ (CTRL/CMD+ALT+SHIFT+C) to minimise points, and check your artwork with the sub-selection tool (A) to ensure that there are no stray points on your lines. Just select a point with the sub-selection cursor, and hit ‘DELETE’ to remove the pesky thing.

Keep gradients to a minimum: a few carefully placed gradients can work wonders, but a whole heap of them will seriously ratchet up your file size.

Use different line colours for easy selection: I’m sure you know that double clicking on a line will select all connecting lines, but it will only select those of the same colour. So, if you want to add detail to an image (shadows, highlights, etc.) and want to delete those new lines without disturbing your old ones—just draw in a new colour. I use violent colours - bright red and neon green - to ensure that no stray line segments get left behind.

Work Efficiently: Working efficiently is essential in a high-pressure production environment - learn your shortcuts and learn to work rapidly. For example, to very quickly trace a scanned sketch, quickly outline your image with the line tool, ensuring that end-points of your lines are created at the base or middles of any curves in the sketch. Then, with the line tool still selected, quickly curve the lines into place. Alternatively, hold down CTRL+ALT to pull lines out into a point.

Flash Bugs: Flash can add extra size to your file for no apparent reason. Try this: copy your layers into a fresh .fla and re-save; often the resulting file will be smaller than the original.

You can create beautiful, illustrated Flash pieces - just take a moment to ensure you’re not creating excess bloat for no reason. Sure, it initially takes a little more time and thought in your working process, but people with slower connections will thank you, and your files will be cleaner and easier to edit. I’m coming at this from the angle of years of designing for schools with mediocre hardware and slow connections, so I admit that I’m a bit of a zealot about it - if you disagree or have had different experiences, by all means comment and let me know! Flash gets a bad rap, but I’m always keen to learn more about the software.