Airbrush Effect in Flash

This post is not about Actionscript. In fact, it’s an embarrassingly simple tip for Flash artists.

Just before Christmas, I’ve asked our main graphic artist to make a simple Holiday greetings card. After two days of work (he kept complaining that he’d need a real model to pose for him), he presented me with the result.

The girl Santa was drawn in Flash, using a Wacom tablet. He told me "I wish I could bring it in Photoshop to make it look a little better". I instantly knew what he meant. He had been using strokes with varying degrees of opacities on different layers to represent shadows and highlights, but the edges were hard and unnatural. I told him - "So you’re after an airbrush effect". Airbrushes allow for very smooth lines, colors and gradients; a very simple example would be the flames painted on cars (not the vinyl decals, the real thing.)

Before and After: see how smooth the shadows and highlights are in the right-hand image

It’s actually very easy to archive similar effects in Flash. Instead of using multi-layered gradients or the "soften fill edges" command, you can simply use the bitmap effects introduced by Flash 8. Just select the areas you want to smooth out, make it a Movie Clip and apply a Gaussian Blur effect. You can go even further, by experimenting with different blending modes (for example, set the shadows to Multiply and highlights to Screen). If you don’t go overboard with effects, you can get some very nice looking graphics without putting any significant strain on the CPU.

Here’s the full version of the card: