Creating a wooden frame in Flash is not too complicated. The following is an example of a wooden frame you will have created towards the end of the tutorial:

For creating a wooden frame like the image above, we need only a few small tricks. The final output you see above is a result of some basic drawing and Flash 8 filters. For easy understanding I have divided this tutorial into three parts:

• Creating the frame shape.
• Adding the wood texture.
• Adding effects using filters.

So what are we waiting for, let’s start!

Creating the Frame Shape
First we need to create a basic frame with the base wood color. So double-click the Rectangle Tool from your toolbox and change the corner radius to 8 or press the Rectangle Tool and click on the Corner Radius button and set the corner radius to 8:

[ the Corner Radius button ]

Now we need 2 rounded rectangles to create a frame. So let’s draw 2 rounded rectangles to simulate both the outer edge of the frame and the inner edge of the frame. You will have an enclosed area between the two rectangle edges that you can fill with a brownish color. You may want to remove the outlines of both the rounded rectangles.

Your stage area should look similar to the following image:

We need to convert this into a movie clip so that later we can apply filter effects on our frame, so select the frame and press Ctrl + F8 and select movie clip.

Add Wooden Texture
Before we start, let?s first take a look at the picture of real wood grains.

Here you can see that there are lines at random distances. Also notice that there are dark lines and light lines which make up grains. We will use the following tones for grain lines:

Add Effects Using Filters
First we need some 3D bevel effect. For that we are going to use Bevel Filter. Now quit the edit mode of our frame movieclip and select the Frame movieclip itself on the stage. Select the filter tab in the property panel and click the little ‘+’ icon to see the list of filters. Select Bevel Filter and modify the parameters as shown below:

As you can see that we have changed Shadow and Highlight colors to dark and light brown colors from black and white. This will give more realistic tones to the lighting.

The above settings will give us the following result:

Now we want to make it look old so we need to reduce its brightness. For achieving this we will use Adjust Color. So again click the little + icon and click Adjust Color. You will see this effect in the active list below Bevel filter. Edit the parameters as shown below:

This will give the following result:

Now we are going to add the final effect for more detail. As you can see, our lighting source direction is on left top side. So if this frame is hung on wall, the top and the left sides of the frame will cast shadows on the inside of the frame and the bottom and the right sides of the frame will cast shadows on outside of the frame. For this we will use Drop Shadow filter from ‘+’ icon.

Configure this filter as shown below:

Following is the output after applying Drop Shadow filter. Tada…

Now your frame is ready for use. Add some background below this frame and your frame will be complete. I had used a Photoshop pattern as a background.

Dark tone:
Light tone:

To create random lines we will use the brush tool. Before we start adding lines I would suggest creating new layers, one for the dark lines and one for the light lines. This allows us to have the flexibility to separate them and change the colors of tones whenever needed:

Now grab the brush tool and pick the appropriate size (from the size list on bottom of the toolbar), smaller is preferable. Now select dark tone color for brush, for that copy the hex value and paste in the color selector dialog.

Now for drawing lines we will use shift key so they are drawn straight. So press the shift key and click on start point and drag till the end of the frame and then release the mouse. Create 2-3 dark lines using this method. The actual reason for selecting brush tool rather than line tool is that stroke drawn with brush tool will vary in thickness even in the straight line. This will be more suitable for grains we want to create.

Now we need more grains on all 4 sides of the boards. So add similar lines on each side. Use both dark and light tones. Also if you wish you can add some mid-tones as well to increase the detail. After adding lines on all sides it may look like this:

So finally we have the basic frame with wooden material ready. Now in order to make it look like a real frame we need to add some 3D effects. To achieve that we are going to use Flash 8 filters.