Flash Tutorial Beginner - Onion Skinning

Onion skinning enables you to view multiple frames at the same time. It is specially helpful when creating an animation consisting of a series of keyframes.

Onion Skin icons are found below the time line. The first allows you to view frames in color while the other displays the object as outlines (keyframes are however displayed in color).

Normal Onion Skin
As shown in the image on the left, the current frame is shown in full color while the other frames are dimmed progressively. This gives an impression of a series of drawings created on onion skin paper and then stacked on top of each other.


Onion Skin in outline mode
For complex animations, it's better to use Onion Skinning in the outline mode.

Flash onion skinning - What else?

Onion skinning may also be employed to manually trace a photograph using the pencil tool . Once traced, the vector drawing can be embellished using other features in Flash. Let us see how this works out with Jim Morrison's picture.

When imported into a new Flash movie (File - Import), the image is centered on the page. I added a Blank Keyframe on the second frame and clicked on the Onion Skin marker. I can now see a faded view of the original.

Still in the second frame, I choose the pencil tool with 1 pixel thick line and start tracing the image manually. The process took me about 5 minutes with extensive use of the zoom tool. The result is an outline of the photograph. I then delete the original photograph from the first frame as well as its symbol from the library.

Now come the interesting part. I fill up some areas of the outlined drawing and save it as a symbol. This is how it looks:

The symbol can then be used in Flash movies. The animation below is just 3498 bytes... Light my Fire!