One of the most useful tools in many desktop graphic applications is the pen tool. The pen tool allows you to draw straight or smooth vector lines, plotting out points on the canvas that are joined by paths. Take a square as a simple example: each corner is a vector point with paths inbetween those points that repesent the straight edges of the square.

The pen tool allows you to draw simple shapes such as the square but with a little practice you’ll be able to draw any complex shape you want as if you were drawing with a pen by hand. Furthermore, as your complex shapes are made up of vector points and paths, you’ll be able to go back and edit your shape at any time and point as well as resize it without losing any quality in the shape.

Our Adobe Fireworks Pen Demonstration

Keep on reading to find our downloadable pen tool tutorial for Adobe Fireworks as well as many hints and tips on how to better use the pen tool.

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Peeling stickers and page curls are a very popular Web 2.0 style that make your images look like their coming off of the screen!

Creating Peeling Stickers and Page Curls

Using Adobe Fireworks we’re going to show you have easy it is to make peeling stickers and this technique can be used in the exact same way for making page curls too! In this tutorial we’ll cover linear fill options, the subselection tool and the slice tool - it’s that easy!

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Quite often, when searching for a relevant image to go on a new website we are designing, we’ll find one that’s almost right, but not quite! We might have a certain picture in mind but when we find it, the object in the picture is perfect but the colours are completely the opposite to what we wanted. Putting it into the design makes the image stick out like a sore thumb and the most important part - the content of the page - fades into the background.

We'll be changing the yellow hot air balloon to a red one

Read on to find out how simple it is to change the colour of a selected part of an image in Adobe Fireworks. In our example we’re going to change the yellow part of the hot air balloon from yellow to red. We’ll use the magic wand tool to select the area we’ll change and then a hue filter to choose the colour we want.

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