The Pencil Tool and Vector Brush Libraries in Adobe Animate

Hey, my name is Dan this particular video is a free video from my full course on HTML5 banner advertising using adobe animate. There's also free files and I've got some finished files that I save after each YouTube video that you can download from my website ill throw a link down in the description. Alright, lets get on to some banner making.

Alright, this video were going to look at the pencil tool and the vector brush libraries. So first thing I want to do is we’re going to set fire to the building. To do it I'm going to show you how to ungroup. So on my stage here I've got my stars layer, which I'm going to lock. I'm going to go to my building layer, unlock it so I can get to it again. And I've got a couple of options I could ungroup it, the problem with ungrouping say one of these windows, because I want to make it look like there's fire coming out of one of them. Is that if I ungroup it its going to disappear watch this, if I go to ungroup, if I let go of it can you see it ends up behind there which is not really what I want. So a way to go inside this group here is to double click it. Watch this, if I double click it, everything else is going to fade out in the background and this up the top is going to change. So I double click it, so it’s faded out and you can see I'm inside this group here, so I've kind of dug in and appeared inside of this group. What I can do now while I'm in here is I'm going to change this to an orange and then to get back you either click on scene one which is our home base stage or you can just double click anywhere out here, its what I like to do and were still grouped which is nice but we've dove inside of it to change the colour.

So what I want to do now is I'm going to lock all two of these layers, make a new layer, make sure this new layer is on top so I click hold and dragged it up and I'm going to call this one fire, and I'm going to show you the pencil tool. So the pencil tool is here and it comes with a couple of options, now because I'm on my laptop I cant see them all, so I'm going to extend this out a bit so it goes into two. Can you see I just grabbed that edge there so if you're on a laptop like me there's going to be some settings that you cant see down the bottom here that you cant see down the bottom here that I want. So I'm going to drag him out, there you go. And he splits into two columns and this is the one that I want, depending on yours might be set to straight and smooth or ink, just to show you that ink is exactly how you imagined it, I'm going to pick a stroke colour of red because its going to be my fire, but say I draw this way, its not bad, it follows your pencil pretty much perfectly.

So I'm going to undo that, the other option, straighten is going to try and do it, this one here is really good for drawing really straight lines, can you see it tries to fix it all and when you try and do curves, it tries to turn it, if I go into circle mode, can you see it did a perfect circle. Its kind of cool but I never use it. So I'm going to delete all of you guys, the one I use quite a bit is the smooth one, so back to the pencil, there's this one in here called smooth. The reason I like smooth is that its got this adjustable setting, if its down at zero it doesn’t do a whole lot, it does what ink does but I crank this up to say 50% its going to help me a little bit so that my curves aren’t so bad. Can you see I'm drawing with my mouse buts sharpening them up. So watch this, if I draw then let go, can you see, it didn’t straighten it well but you get the point. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw some flames over here, so my buildings on fire, awesome.

So that’s the pencil tool, now lets look at one of the new things for adobe animate and it’s the brush library. So brush libraries just help you turn these really basic strokes, so I'm going to select them all with my black arrow, all of you guys. And I was thinking about it, because they're on their own separate layers and I've locked the other layers I can select everything in here, I'm just dragging a box around it and I only get the stuff that’s on my layer. The next thing I want to look at is under window, brush libraries, there it is and come down here. so there's a bunch of premade ones, lets look at some of the ones that were not going to use now but the arrows are quite useful. So if I pick an arrow, one of the standard arrows and I double click it, can you see what happens to my lines over here, they’ve got little point heads at the front of it. And what you can do is watch this, I'm going to move him out the way and you see there's my stroke so I can increase the stroke and can you see the arrow heads are increasing so I've got up to 26, I'm not too sure what I'm going to use yet but there's artistic there's some decorative ones, there's some really bad ones in here, they're all just hacked out of illustrator you might have seen them before.

So lets have a look at some of these other ones. So I'm in vector pack, double click, it can take a little time to apply some of these more complicated brushes and I'm just trying to find something that looks kind of like flames. That looks like an explosion that ones kind of cool, the ones I was using before under chalk charcoal pencil are kind of cool, this one here I decided on or maybe this one underneath. That works for me. Alright, I'm going to close that one down, click off in the background and you can see here, it looks a little bit more like flames out the window. So you can import other ones, so what you want to do is look for brushes. But you can bring in the ones from illustrator and there's a lot more online in terms of free vector brushes that you can import into adobe animate and use for your animations. Alright, so that’s the pencil tool and the brush libraries.

Alright, that’s if for the free video, its pretty good right? What I really want you to do now is I want you to go and sign up for my full course, ill put the link in the description if you're keen. I have loads of other good free stuff so make sure you subscribe, give me a thumbs up if you liked it, and yeah. Hare ra good youtube people.