 Hello everybody, welcome back to another Adobe Animate 2021 tutorial. In this one, I'm going to show you how to manipulate text, how to expand it, scale it, envelope it, distort it, skew it, change colors. This is basically going to show you how to do all kinds of things with text, but specifically we're going to do it natively inside Adobe Animate. Now let me show you, there are a few steps here you want to go through to make sure you get this right. So I'm just going to delete this here, which is just an example of some stuff I was messing around with. I'm going to delete it. The first step to get going is you want to go to your toolbar here, click on the text tool, left click on that T, and then left click on the canvas, and you're going to see here that I've got a 160 point font, and I'm just going to type my name. Now it's in yellow because that was the last color that I used. Let's go ahead and dig in a little further. So I'm going to left click out of it, I'm going to click on the arrow, and then the next step, and this is an optional one, is I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to go and actually increase the size. So I'm going to just go down to maybe 200 points because I want this to be big and in your face. All right, hit enter, and big, bang, there it is. Now it's 200. Okay, cool. Now what you can do next, if you want to center it, you just go to the align button here on your far right toolbar, left click on that, and then we're going to align it to the stage. You'll see the check marks to align the stage, so I'm just going to center this to the stage, and then I'm going to center it horizontally and vertically. Okay, good. All right, clicking out of it, that's as far as we've gotten. Now what we want to do next, and this is where it gets interesting, is I'm going to left click on it. I'm actually going to change the fill color while I got you. I'm going to change it to something a little more obvious like, what do you want to do? You guys want to do blue? Yeah, let's do blue. Okay, cool. There, my name's in blue, and it changed it by clicking on the fill, and then changing the color. Now the next step, I'm going to click on all of it, so I'm going to right click, or left click, part of me, and then I'm going to drag over the entire word. And now we're going to go up to modify up here, and we're going to start breaking these apart. And what we're going to do is we're going to break this apart into the individual letters. And I left click on break apart. Now look at this. You'll see here that the C is separate, the U is separate. Every one of the letters has been separated. This is actually very useful, especially if you guys are looking to make just individual effects, but without too much fanciness on each individual letter. The next step, however, is I'm going to go ahead and select everything again, and then I'm going to go to modify, and I'm going to break apart a second time. And when you do that, what happens is you actually create these into shapes now. So what was a word, which was my name, became individual letters, and now they've become individual shapes. When I left click on the S, for example, you will see here that this is a filled shape, and we can now go in and start doing some changes on an individual letter or actually an individual shape. So here we go. Let's go with the C. I'm going to left click on the C. And let's say I don't like the color blue. I want this to be some sort of purple. Simply click on the fill, select the color you like. Okay, nice and pinky purple there. Presto, we've gone and made a change. Maybe I don't like the color of that S. I want that S to be green. I don't know. I mean, I'm just showing you examples here. Boom. Now we've got a little flavor in here on the wording or the coloring. Now, however, the next part, and this is the critical part for making adjustments to the size and the shape, is I'm just going to click on the letter C here or my shape C. And then what you want to do to go really deep is you want to left click on the free transform tool right here. Left click on that. When you do that, you will see at some place you'll see here the distort options. For me, it's located right here, but my toolbar's got a few more things in it than the basic toolbar, so it might be a little higher up for you. You'll see distort and when I left click on distort, I get a few options. I get scaling, I get rotating, I get free transforming, I get enveloping. So let's go ahead and just start with the generic distort. When you do that, you'll see here that I can click on it and now watch. I'll click on this left corner and I'm going to pull it up to the left. See how I distorted the C? Boom. Awesome. Maybe I want it to look something like that. Okay, cool. And maybe I want to widen it. I don't know. I mean, that looks kind of weird. Okay, cool. I've gone ahead and distorted the C. Looks interesting. Let's start with the S here and I'm going to go back to the distort option and instead of distort, I'm going to envelope this one. And here I'm going to left click on envelope and you're going to see here that there's a whole bunch of options. So I'm going to just show you the basics of it. Okay, I've gone ahead and adjusted the S a little bit. Put a pull of top up. I'm going to make it look like a money sign. Maybe I want to make it a little wider. I mean, there's handles here. You get the point. You can actually just go totally nuts and make tons of changes however you see fit. These ones are all really, really ugly. But hey, again, I'm just teaching you a technique. I'm not going to win a prize for design. But envelope is an option. Okay, cool. The next one, let's work on the U here. And instead of envelope, I just want to rotate and skew it. So what I'm going to do is I've gone ahead, clicked on distort, rotate and skew. And now when I'm over top of the edge here, you're going to see that I get this sort of arrow in a circle. This allows me to rotate. So I'm going to rotate that U as an example. Again, this is just an example. And then I'm going to skew it like so. So there we go. I'm going to take the T. I'm going to rotate the T backwards. Let's see. Yeah, okay, a little backwards. And then you'll see here when I got the half arrows up and down, I'm going to go ahead and skew it. And what I'm basically doing is I'm taking a generic, just my name in a standard font and making major adjustments, very similar to what you can do in Adobe Illustrator. But we're doing this natively inside Adobe Animate. Guys, that's all I got for this tutorial. I have a ton more stuff coming up. Stay tuned. I will be back soon.