Cute Flash Flower

Here is a picture with one special flower. It doesn't need water or sunlight but it needs much affection. And besides all that, girls seem to appreciate it because it's very sweet. So read the information presented bellow to learn how to impress your girlfriend with a pimped flower.

This is a picture taken with a mobile phone, so it's not the best quality you can get. But we don't need a super picture, because we want to recreate in Flash the flower from the picture. What are the advantages you may ask? Well the first thing would be that we are building a vectorial shape (that means we can stretch and expand it as we wish, it will still look cool, not pixilated), second is the fact that we can animate as we wish this shape and third is its size: 3 kbs.

Open Flash and let's get to work. Create a New File and inside it, create a New Symbol inside the Library. Here import the picture from the archive and place it in the stage. The idea is simple: we have to recreate the flower on an upper layer than the one we used for the background. And the easiest way to do that is by using the brush tool to draw over the picture (block the last layer before beginning so you don't paint the background and screw everything). Remember that we don't need to create the perfect effect, but rather a sweet and funny one, so imperfections become a must.

To duplicate the flower do the following: when you want to recreate an area, you have to first select a color closer to the one on the picture, create a new layer, block the rest of the layers and move the cursor, with the brush tool selected, over the desired region. Use the order presented in the animation above. After you do this, if you select all the layers, you will get something like this:

Next you have to figure out what you want to do with the flower, because from case to case, you may need to convert parts of the flower into Symbols (to use in a Tween Motion for example). We did just small animations, but there are a lot of ways in which the character can behave. We made the flower blink by converting the eyes into a Movie Clip, 15 frames with the opened eyes and 2 frames with them closed (a squeezed version of the first). Also the flower gives you a kiss from time to time, this being done by including the mouth in a Movie Clip and using Tween Shape for morphing it into the desired shape. The rest of the animations are done with simple Tween Motion so please check them in the source file.

If you like our character and you feel you can improve it, please do so and if you have a nice animation please send it to us and we will publish it on the site. Our intentions were to teach the technique, not to create the coolest effect ever. But if you do so, let us know.

Enjoy!