Stage and Toolbox

The stage is the area where you draw, paint, add text, and manipulate the graphical components of your movies.

You can zoom in on the stage to magnify your work by selecting View |Zoom In or View| Zoom Out from the menu, or by holding the Control key and pressing the + key to zoom in or the - key to zoom out.

If you like to use rulers and grids when drawing or working with art, you can add these to the Stage by selecting View | Rulers or View | Grid from the menu. To create a guideline, click within a ruler and drag the mouse onto the stage where you want the guide to be.

The toolbox contains a set of tools for creating and editing graphics on the stage. Many of the tools have options that let you choose more specifically how they will function. We won't be creating a lot of new graphics in this tutorial, but there are a few tools that you'll need to be able to use:

The Arrow tool

The Arrow tool is used to select objects on the Stage. Once an object is selected, it can be moved or modified.

The Oval and Rectangle tools

The oval and rectangle tools are used to draw shapes. The outline of shapes created with either of these tools takes the color indicated by the stroke color box in both the Colors section of the Toolbox and in the Property Inspector. The interior takes the color indicated by the fill color box.

The Paintbucket tool

The Paintbucket tool is used to quickly fill shapes with color, gradients, or images. Its default behavior is to fill shapes with the color indicated by the fill color box in both the Colors section of the Toolbox and in the Property Inspector.

The Eraser tool

The eraser tool is used to remove graphics on the stage. Double-click the Eraser tool to delete everything on the stage at once.