Most of the todays cartoonists are using Flash as their main tool to output their creative fun cartoon animation. This because the magnificent advantages you can find in Flash. It is easy to learn, great in the output and you can output your animation for different media like desktop, web, video, TV and even mobile devices.

I have experienced 3 way to use Flash for creating cartoon. Here, I will briefly discuss the 3 methods and I will write a deeper article about it in the next few days.

1- Using Flash to create the animation only

In my opinion, it is the least method to use Flash capabilities, I do not think it is sufficient enough, but I tell about it since I have seen many people still use it.

In this method, cartoonist draw their characters and animations as Frames and  scan them in a program like Adobe Photoshop as art line with alias lines. Then they import it into Flash and do a Bitmap Trace option to convert the animation in vector lines.  and they do the same with each frame. This ends in Flash with a frame-by-frame animtion.

This method advatage is that the cartoonist does not have to learn drawing in Flash or if he/she does not have a tablet pen for easy drawing in Flash. But the disadvatages of this method are many such as:

1- The produced aniamtion is hard to edit as the cartoonist will have to draw and scan their modification again.

2- produce large file size

3- Does not provide much creativity as the traced lines s actually automated and does not provide outline techniques.

2- Drawing and animating in Flash

In this method, the cartoonist draw their characters in Flash using tablet pen or similier tool to draw their characters. The shapes and the characters are divided into parts such as dividing the cartoon character to hands, feet, body, head…etc. and save them in the library as and use them in the animation.

The advatages of this method are:

1- Easy to modify animation

2- Less file size

3-  more creative flexibility since the character uses different brush techniques in creating the animation.

3- Using both methods together

In this methods, cartoonists use both methods as they scan some parts of the animation and draw some other. This can be helpful if the animator find difficulties in drawing directly in Flash.

These are the main 3 methods I experienced from the cartoonists I have worked with them, and i think it covers briefly how they do cartoon in Flash