In this tutorial, I'm going to take you through the process of creating attractive texts in Flash. Knowing how to make a decent-looking text in Flash is a great advantage. You don't have to launch Photoshop or CorelPainter to achieve the desired effect—you just do it in Flash! :-)
This is what you will be able to create by the end of this tutorial:
Note: This is not a "design your text" tutorial. It will not make you more creative. Rather, this tutorial will show you the tools that are most often used while creating something more than just an ordinary text created with the Text Tool.
i. Create a new Flash document, 400x600, fps doesn't matter.
ii. We always start off with something very basic. So, let's write a text with the Text Tool (T). My text reads "Flash". The color of this text is will be red.
iii. It's a good habit to work inside a symbol, not on the main Timeline. So, select your text and press F8 to convert the text to a Movieclip or Graphic Symbol.
iv. Double click on the Movieclip to get inside it. Once there, select everything (Ctrl + A) and press Ctrl + B to Break the text apart.
What Break apart does is convert the text to a Fill. Only in this form can stroke be applied to the letters, which we're going to do in the next paragraph.
v. Press S to activate the Ink Bottle Tool. What this tools does is create a Stroke around a given figure. Let's first set the color of Stroke to a little darker shade of the color you set your text to. It my case it is dark red.
Then, click once on each of the letters to achieve the desired effect. The letters should now all have stroke around them. Your text should look like shown below at this point:
vi. Now, that was good for starters. Let's make some improvements. What about creating a gradient on the text?
A gradient is a gradual transition from one color to another. In our case, we would like the gradient to go from light red to a little darker shade of red.
Before we apply a gradient, we first need to create it. So, open the Color Mixer Window (Shift + F9) and go to Type: Radial.
Set the first pointer to dark red, the other—to light red, as shown below:
At this point, we need to apply the gradient to a text. So, press K to activate the Paint Bucket Tool, then select the letters (without the stroke!) and click on them to apply the gradient.
If you don't like your gradient, play around with the Gradiet Transform Tool (F). What I did with my gradient was stretch it sideways.
This is more or less what your text might look like if you have followed my instructions:
vii. Let's now make the text a little more 3D. Here is one of the ways you can do that:
1. Select the text and Copy it (Ctrl + C)
2. Create a new layer (it should be at the bottom!) and Paste it in Place (Ctrl + Shift + V).
3. Go to Modify>Shape>Expand Fill. As says the name of this function, it expands (or insets) fills. We will want it our fill to be expanded by some 4 pixels.
It might be a good idea to improve it manually if it doesn't look good enough.
4. Lastly, select the entire copy of the text and nudge it left (with your arrow keys). This will make it look 3D.
viii. We are almost done. What we now need to do is apply gradient to strokes. This can be done the same way as applying gradients to Fills. The Type of the gradient and Color of the pointers should all be the same as shown above, at step vi.
If done correctly with the use of the Gradient Transform Tool (F), gradient on a stroke will make the text look even more 3D.
Tip: Once the gradient on the stroke is ready it might be a good idea to convert the stroke to fills. Go to Modify>Shape>Convert Lines to Fills to do that.
A cast shadow
ix. The last step is adding a cast shadow behind the text. To do that, we need to:
1. Copy (Ctrl + C) the text that we've create so far.
2. Paste it in Place (Ctrl + Shift + V).
3. Select all of it, Break it Apart (Ctrl + B) and make it black in the Color Mixer Window (Shirt + F8)
4. Convert it to a Movieclip (F8) and apply a Blur filter to it.
Note: The layers that contains the cast shadow should be at the bottom.
So! This is basically the process of creating attractive texts in Flash. From now on, you should be able to create your own cool texts in Flash!
Thanks for reading and I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial.