Custom Fills

Fireworks contains a good selection of fills for your use in creating your works of art, but just like visiting any D.I.Y. Superstore, you can't always find exactly what you want! Thankfully, the boffins at Macromedia saw this one coming from a long way off and provided you with the tools to create your own customised fills. The secret to creating re-useable customised fills in Fireworks is the STYLES panel, as you will discover soon!
Before we start, it's worth bearing in mind that this process can be successfully used for creating ANY metallic fill. Simply choose a different fill colour according to the metal you wish to emulate! ("Chrome/Steel", for example, would be mostly black and grey/white colours, "Copper" would be brown/golden brown and so on...).

Now, let's create an "Aluminium" metallic fill.

Open a new canvas and draw a rectangle with a pale grey fill. The size doesn't really matter - we're simply using this object as a palette on which to create our fill. I would suggest something like 50Hx200W.
Open the "Fill" panel and select "Linear" from the drop-down list, as shown below:

The resulting graphic should look just like this:



Click the "EDIT" button in the Fill panel and you should now see a panel like this:



The display has defaulted to the WHITE>GREY linear fill colours based on the pale grey we selected for our filled rectangle. By clicking on the bar between the two existing fill markers, we can automatically insert intermediate colour markers. Note, however, that any markers placed on the bar by you will stick to the pre-set gradient, i.e. they will move from WHITE>GREY gradually as shown below:

To add a little "localised" highlight or shadow at specific points on the bar, you should click the chosen marker and select the new colour/tone from the swatch panel which opens up. The swatch panel only offers a few white/grey options and that's simply not enough! So, to select the necessary tonal variations you need, click the "colour-wheel" marker in the top-right corner of the swatch panel and choose your tones from the side-bar colour-picker which now appears.

To create our "Aluminium" customised fill, we need to create a smooth mix of white/pale grey/darker grey markers as shown below.



It's a simple matter of placing markers along the fill bar and varying the tones to give a soft, metallic sheen to our object. You will, I promise you, spend more time thinking "What does chrome/steel/copper etc. actually look like?", than you will creating the fills! Don't worry if you don't get it right straight away - the effect can be edited to your heart's content at any time you wish. And, if you wish to get rid of any excess markers, simply click/drag them completely off the panel and they're gone!

Once you have created a suitably impressive block of aluminium, click to open the "Styles" panel. Click the small "+" sign at the bottom-right (and be carefull you don't hit the trash-can by mistake!!!) and type a name for your fill in the box which pops up (I would suggest.... erm.... Aluminium ?). You are now ready to apply this "Style" to any graphic you choose in future by selecting the graphic, opening the Styles panel, and clicking the style of your own making! You can even add some individuality to each new object by adjusting the fill bar handles which appear when you apply the style.

Have fun! Get creative!