Whether it’s the middle of October or you just want a little Halloween year-round, you can make a Jack o’Lantern in just a few minutes, and even make it into a card for your family or friends.
First, open Cool Motion; you should have a new file open automatically. Click on the Oval Tool on the Toolbar, and then use the Shape Panel to select a line color and the fill color. I’ve picked a dark orange for the outline, and a lighter orange for the inside color.
Click on the white area of the stage, and drag your mouse to draw a circle. Make it wider than it is tall; pumpkins are squat and fat.
Click on the Reshape Tool in the Toolbar; we can use this to make the pumpkin taller or shorter, fatter or thinner. We can also rotate it or make it fatter on the bottom than on the top. Let’s go ahead and give that a try; at the bottom of the toolbar, you should see four buttons. Click on the one on the right and bottom, the Envelope button. That way we can just enlarge individual parts of the pumpkin, instead of the entire thing.
Do you see the box surrounding the circle? Click on the dot on the bottom left corner, hold your mouse button down, and drag it to the left so that the bottom of the pumpkin swells to the left. Then click on the dot on the bottom right corner, hold your mouse button down, and drag it to the right so that the bottom of the pumpkin swells to the right, and matches the left side.
There! Now it’s shaped more like a real pumpkin.
Look above the picture that you’re drawing, at the Timeline. We’re going to need a new layer, so we can draw more things without erasing what we already drew.
Click on the Pencil Tool, and use the Shape Panel to select the same orange color that you used on the pumpkin’s outline. Pick a line width, and then use your mouse to paint details on the pumpkin. If you want, you can make another layer, and use the Pencil Tool and a green shade to paint a stem onto the pumpkin.
Click on the Pen Tool on the Toolbar, and use the Shape Panel to change the fill and line colors to black. Create another new layer on top of the rest.
We’re going to draw triangles for eyes, but instead of painting them like we did with the Pencil Tool, we’re going to click them into place. It’s like playing connect-the-dots; click on the picture, and one dot will appear. Click again, and make a new dot; Flash will draw a line between the two.
If you look on the Timeline, you’ll see that each layer has a list of frames—units of time on which you can draw new pictures, or keep the same one for as long or as little as you want. If you see a black dot on the frame, it means that there’s a shape drawn on that frame; if you see solid grey, then it means that the same shape is holding its position over those frames.
We want to make the pumpkin dark sometimes, but lit at other times, so we need to move beyond one frame. Click on the black dot in the first frame where you drew your pumpkin, then click the right mouse button to open a menu. Look for Copy Frames on that menu, and left-click on it.
Click your mouse on a blank frame further down the timeline—say, on Frame 10. (You can see the numbers at the top, where the red line is.) Right-click to open the menu, then left-click on Paste Frames. You’ll see a new black dot appear, and everything that you drew on that layer will show up on your movie.
Do this again on every layer that you’ve drawn.
When you’re finished, use the Shape Panel to select a bright yellow fill color and lin color.
Make sure that you’ve clicked on the last frame—the black dot to the farthest right—on the layer where you’ve drawn your pumpkin’s face. Then click with the Paint Bucket tool inside of the first pumpkin’s eye. It should turn bright yellow, as if there’s a candle inside lighting it up.
Now do the same with the other eye, nose, and mouth, and you should be done. You can see it work by press Ctrl + Enter.