Fireworks Basics
Posted by 
Cajen | Filed under fireworks, tutorial series
Start.
Hello everyone! I hope everyone’s doing fine today. I will be starting my first tutorial series on graphics. I use Adobe Fireworks – very easy and intuitive in my opinion. I will be touching on the basics of the tools available for us. In the succeeding posts, we are going to know them more intimately.
I draw with vector graphics. You can google vector graphics to get a grasp of what it means as opposed to raster graphics, but all in all – vector graphics is considered lossless – because transforming (enlarging, zooming) vector graphics will not cause the unsightly blurring that happens with raster graphics. You can create any graphics of any size that you are comfortable with, and resize it later without fear of losing any clarity or detail. As such, I will be discussing with you several vector tools. Open fireworks and create a new document. Pick any size and choose white as your background. On the left pane, you should see a couple of icons.
The first set is your selection tools. It allows you to choose the objects that you’d like to work with. The next set are involve with bitmap (raster graphics), which we are not going to involve ourselves with – not at the moment at least. Next set are your vector tools. The first one is your line tool. Which helps you create (surprise) a line! Click on the line icon to choose it. If you notice on the bottom part, is your properties panel. It lets you change the properties of the object that you are working one. For your line, you can change the color, thickness, etc. Play with it.
Now to create a line, you simply click, hold, drag then release. Easy enough.
Next we have the Pen tool. This is gonna be our best friend. I suggest that you play with it until you are acquainted with its functions. To create a shape, just click, click and click. Unlike the line tool where you have to drag, you just have to click to create a point, and the points will determine the number of ‘adjustable points’ the shape will have. To close the shape, just click on the first point. The indicator on the pen tell will turn to a ‘o’ to indicate that you will be closing the shape.
You can also create ‘curvy’ shapes. This is done by clicking on an area to create a point, and instead of releasing, you drag your mouse to create the wavy line. By dragging, you create handles, on either side of the line segment, which you can use later to adjust the ‘curviness’ of that particular segment.
You also have the option of creating the handle first, by pressing and holding the alt-key, click and then drag the mouse to the direction of the handle. Using the alt-key will only create one handle for that segment instead of 2 handles with dragging alone.
To manipulate the handles, click on the subselection tool, then click any point on the shape. The handle/s for that particular line segment will appear. Lengthening/shortening the handle will make the line segment bulge or recede.
Adjusting the angle of the handle will adjust the way the line segment leans.
TIP: To create lines that are completely perpendicular, just press and hold the shift-key, it will cause the line to snap at an angle that is a multiple of 45deg.
Next is the ellipse tool. Actually, this is what I’d like to call the shape tool – because if you click and hold on the icon, it will reveal other shapes that you can insert in your project. Again, play with the shapes and acquaint yourself with it.
That pretty much covers the basics for shape creation and manipulation in fireworks. Our next topic will cover colors, gradients, transparency, fills, etc. Until then!
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Tags: fireworks, graphics, raster, vector
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3 Responses to “Fireworks Basics”
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CajenSoft » Blog Archive » » Fireworks: Color, Gradients and Transparencies Says:
May 28th, 2008 at 4:55 pm[...] everyone! As I’ve mentioned in my previous post in this series, we are going to discuss colors, gradients and transparencies in Fireworks. Open your fireworks and [...]
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Adobe Firefox'u (new comment) Says:
October 25th, 2008 at 4:57 pm[...] Size flash’
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lucian-bordianu.com Tutorials » Blog Archive » Fireworks Tutorials : Fireworks Video Tutorial: Highlights, Midtones, Gradients, & Overlay(new comment) Says:
November 8th, 2008 at 6:16 am[...] Fireworks Basics Fireworks: Color, Gradients, Transparencies [...]
Hi there and welcome! I am an accomplished gamer, programmer and web designer enthusiast, an artist interrupted, a budding entrepreneur, and now a blogger. Through this blog, I will be sharing you my thoughts and I hope that you do the same. This blog will contain blogging tips & tricks, fireworks tutorials, photoshop tutorials, web design, graphics, and then some. As I’ve mentioned in my first post, I claim no level of proficiency in any of the tutorials that I will be posting, however, I pride myself in being a good instructor and I will try to make them as easy as possible for everyone.