Word Balloons in Flash
Word balloons are really simple to make in Flash, using the ‘Oval Tool’ and the ‘Line Tool’. Start by making a simple oval large enough to fit your text. It doesn’t have to be exact, as one of the pleasures of working with vector art is that you can scale your objects as much as you’d like without any loss of quality.
Next you’ll add a tail to the balloon, and again you have lots of flexibility if you don’t get it right the first time. Just select your line tool, and drag two lines onto your balloon, making sure they connect at the pointy end of the tail.
Now you have to remove the little black line that’s visible above the tail. Using your selection tool, just click on the line, and hit delete.
It’s starting to look like a word balloon here… you’ll have to go to your paint bucket tool and fill in the tail with white, especially if your balloon is going to go above a background other than plain white.
Again, because your lines are vectors rather than bitmaps, it’s very easy to adjust the lines any way you want. If you grab the tip of the tail, you can drag it in any direction you want, or extend it as long as you want. Alternatively, if you’d like the tail to have a little curl, you can select in the middle of the line and adjust the curve.
Now it’s just a matter of adding text over the word balloon. If you change your mind about the text, and need more space, you can select the word balloon and scale it to be as large as you need. Or you can stretch it, skew it, etc.
Flash is a vector-based graphics program, but it does have some basic bitmap filters, such as glow, drop shadow, blur, etc. To use them, you must first convert your object to a ‘Movie Clip’, and then add the filter. The above word balloon has had a drop shadow added to it. Bear in mind that it is still a vector object, and you can still edit the text, the shape of the balloon, the tail, or anything else you want.
Final Image
Here’s the final image with a very simple background object thrown in, and a black glow around the drawing.
Sandy Debreuil
http://www.crowbarbenson.com
sandy@crowbarbenson.com
