How to Cheat

2 Geometric and
in Design Styles

Organic Shapes

1 To suggest a fully mature tree with a plumage of leaves, you don’t actually have to draw
each individual leaf. Since the design style is targeted at young children, it’s valid to keep the
level of detail to a minimum. Select the Oval Tool o and your desired fill color and create an
oval shape. Next rotate it or skew to position it at an angle. Copy and paste it and scale it to add
more leaves. Rotate and position the new oval as shown above. There’s no wrong decision at this
stage as it is entirely up to you as to how much variation you want your tree to have.

D ESIGNING WITH BASIC SHAPES IS NOT

limited to characters. For most Animate
projects, I start with primitive shapes for all 3 The trunk of the tree is designed in a similar fashion. Create a basic rectangle using the
Rectangle Tool r and use the Selection Tool v to push and pull the sides and corners to give
objects including props and backgrounds. At the trunk a slight curve and taper. Each branch is a duplicate of the tree trunk shape. Hold down
OA and then click and drag the trunk to create as many duplicates of it as you want. Scale,
their most basic level, my designs start with
skew, rotate, and position each duplicate shape so that they resemble tree branches.
simple ovals or rectangles, and from there I
build upon these shapes to create relatively
complex images. What I love about working
with vectors is the ability to push and pull
them into anything I want as if they were
made of clay.
VECTOR ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS GEORGENES

5 With Snap to Objects on, drag a corner point to another corner point until they snap together.
Snapping to an object makes it easy to merge different shapes together accurately. To complete
the front side of the birdhouse, create another square and drag the top two corner points to the
bottom two corner points of the triangle with the Selection Tool v until they snap together. Skew
the shape with the Distort Tool (subselection of the Free Transform Tool q) to suggest perspective.

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 Adobe Animate CC How to Cheat in Adobe Animate CC

HOT TIP
As you can see
each shape has

2 Repeat the previous step by copying and pasting the same oval to suggest a larger plumage of leaves. Scale, skew, and rotate the a bounding
shape and position it off-center from the original oval. The objective here is to create a nonsymmetrical organic shape to suggest box around it
the imperfections that are found in nature. Remember, nothing in nature is perfectly horizontal, vertical, round, or square, which is why because Object
there’s no wrong way to position these. As you can see I used a total of four ovals to complete my plumage of leaves. I could have used Drawing Mode
more or less, but I felt this was just the right amount. Feel free to experiment with the number of shapes and variations for your tree. j was turned
At this stage, I couldn’t help but add a little bit of texture to suggest some volume using the Brush Tool b and a subtle yellow color. on at the time
the objects were
drawn. Object
Drawing Mode
allows you to
overlap objects
without merging
them together.

4 The birdhouse is also built using simple shapes. The key here is to turn on the Snap to Objects feature represented by the magnet
icon in the toolbar when you select the Rectangle Tool r. Create a perfect square by dragging with the Rectangle Tool while
holding down the S key. Using the Subselection Tool a, select one of the corner points and press the D key. The square is now
a triangle. Rotate the triangle using the Free Transform Tool q. Hold down the S key to constrain the rotation to 45º increments.
Rotate the triangle until the bottom side is flat and the top side is pointed.

6 The remaining additional

shapes for the birdhouse
are also (you guessed it)
simple rectangles and ovals.
Keeping the Snap option
turned on, drag corner
points to each other to
join shapes and as Object
Drawings you can also
overlap shapes to complete SHORTCUTS
the image. MAC WIN BOTH

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