Animating Brushes

The challenge was to incorporate the use of three different Photoshop brushes into a photograph, then animate brushes in Flash using masks. 

Well, I didn't want to do any type of floral design decoration, so I went thescenic route.

Though I made the brushes of the sheep and stroked them on a path, I wasn't quite satisfied with it and I didn't think the border collie joke was good enough to pull it off. So I did another one.

In the Lake Tapps / Mt. Rainier, I thought the brushes needed a little extra so I added a bevel and emboss and inner shadow effects to the trees and leaves brushes as well as a drop shadow to the grass brushes. I animated the smoke, trees and leaves in Flash, then did a motion tween on the ground to fade in and a shape tween to the explosion smoke brushes. Before I added the title and ending, I wasn't satisfied with the fast speed of the animation, so I had to add some increments to the animation and extra frames to get the final results.

If I did each tree and leaf on its own layer, it would have given the image more dimension, As it is, I have more than enough layers already (Flash was running a little slooow.)