Macromedia Flash 8 - Working with the Ink Bottle Tool

That kind of leaves us with only a couple of tools left. There are interesting ones. I am going to pick out the ink bottle tool. Now, we have taken a look at the paint bucket tool. If I just review it, we talked about it just a moment ago. My paint bucket tool is good for taking enclosed areas and adding fills to them or taking previously filled areas and changing the colors on them. Well, your ink bottle tool is basically a paint bucket for strokes. Now, that is a bit of an odd concept but let us think about what we did with the paint bucket tool.

In a couple of places, we drew our rolling hills here with just some pencil lines and some line segments, surrounded an area and then filled it. Well, if I look around my drawing, I have got a couple of places like for instance, the area around this grass. I have got two fills and I have got no strokes. What I can do is I am going to change my stroke color here. I am going to pick a dark green, darker than the other grass surrounding it. And, all I need to do is click on those edges. You can see my tool is looking for a fill edge here. I am going to drop it in and there you see, I have added a stroke where there was not one before. So just like I can take a close stroke and add a fill to it, I can use this tool to take a fill and add a stroke to it. I could add another profile to the hill here, give a little definition to our hill as it goes around and any place else that I feel like I need a stroke line and draw it. This is also particularly useful if you use tools that only draw fills. I was always thinking about I am making a little sheep. Something has got to clean up the grass in this area. I will make it pretty much like my cloud was, very original. So I draw a little sheep here. It is quite exciting. It needs some legs so I will pick out some other tools. You can see that follows right along with just choosing the right tools for whatever it is you want to do. I have chosen a smooth line with my pencil tool. Probably green lines are not good. I will just make a dark gray line for the outline of his little feet there. Very crude, but you get the idea.

If I wanted to continue that outline around this area, I could just use my ink bottle. It is going to pick up the stroke color and drop it right around the sheep. In that way, I can get that definition. I will use the fill here on these legs. Oops, I really filled the whole hill with white. Maybe he should have a little oval head with some ears on it or something. I am certainly no expert at drawing sheep. So you can kind of get the idea there.