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1. Preparing the Line Art

Doing the line art in Flash is fairly simple. But the way to do it varies, depending on what you use. So I show you how I did the lines with a mouse back in the day and how I do them today with my graphic tablet. However, one thing is the same for both ways: Insert a new layer on top of your sketch.

With a graphic tablet:
I always use the brush tool for my lines when I use the tablet, because it will give you always clean lines on the first pass:

Additionally, you can as well check the ‘use pressure’ option in the options part of the tools panel to get varying thicknesses.
Now, if your line didn’t come out the way you wanted it to be, don’t just delete it and start all over. If you need to correct the thickness of a line, just pick the selection tool and drag out the line or pull it back in:

Continue like that till you inked the entire sketch. Just keep one thing in mind though. The zoom stage you’re currently working in will always effect the thickness of your brush stroke. This means that even if you use the same brush size at 300% zoom, the actual stroke will look thinner then the one you did at 100%. So you actually don’t need to change your brush size every time like you would have to in Photoshop for example, you just have to change the zoom stage to get different effects.

With a mouse:

Using the brush tool together with a mouse is quite frustrating, I’ve tried it often enough. I don’t like to use the pen tool either, because it works different than the pen tool of Illustrator or Photoshop.

So, I used a little trick to achieve varying thicknesses with a mouse. Grab the line tool and start tracing over your sketch. Now, Flash has a really nice feature when it comes to lines, because you can turn them into fills with just a few clicks. Select some of your lines and go to Modify – Shape – Convert Lines to Fills and voilá, your lines are now fills.
All you have to do now is to pick up the selection tool and start dragging out your lines to simulate brush strokes:

And again, the zoom stage effects the final thickness of the line, so take care of that, too.

Here’s how my lines look in the end:

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