11 Inspiring Projects Skillshare Students Created Using Adobe Fresco

One easy way to push yourself creatively? Exploring new tools and techniques! That’s why we are so excited to have been able to partner with Adobe around their newest digital painting and drawing app, Fresco. We worked with Top Skillshare teachers and designers to create five new classes about the brand-new digital illustration tool, and encouraged students to try their hand at using the new app to create their own projects. We are amazed at what they’ve been able to accomplish!

Looking for some visual inspiration? See what ten talented students created for our first round of Adobe Fresco classes.  

1. Hello fall

What better way to usher in a new season than by broadening your creative horizons? That’s what Skillshare student Dena Wimette set out to do by taking Dylanin Mierzwinski's Lettering & Florals class. "Not only did I learn the basics of Fresco, but I also picked up a bunch of tools for design strategy and process," she writes. Wimette was specifically inspired by fall's spectrum of colors and shapes for this project, which features a simple phrase wrapped up in a loose floral wreath. 

2. My dream studio

In her Skillshare Original Creative Digital Illustration: Learn to Use Adobe Fresco, illustrator  Lisa Feng challenges her students to imagine their dream workspace and then to digitally illustrate it using Fresco. Skillshare student Rebecca Elfast’s project takes us on a whimsical escape to a waterside studio, complete with a warm and glowing moon, twinkling stars, stretching cattails, and a brightly lit space enjoyed by one happy artist.

3. Leap

Skillshare student Gary King credits  Rich Armstrong’s Abstract Art: Easy Ways to Express Yourself with Adobe Fresco with helping him unlock the apps potential. He says, “I doubt I would have given Adobe Fresco a try without [Armstrong’s] enthusiastic introduction, and it has got me working in ways that are new and exciting.” The pieces King created for the class reflect that excitement; each are  rich with movement, color, imagination, and a true sense of energy.

4. Plant for the future

Skillshare student Di Ujdi’s beautiful work is a literal and figurative reminder that learning something new isn’t always about the immediate result — but about growing into the person (and creative) you want to become.

5. Encounters of the scariest kind

In illustrator Ira Marck’s Other Worlds: Illustrate a Fantasy Scene with Adobe Fresco, students were encouraged  to tell the story of an imagined land using Fresco’s broad array of brushes. Student Martin Rodriguez seized the creative opportunity and delivered an almost spooky rendering of a monstrous  bird-meets-lion basking in the moon’s spotlight. The way his work uses shadows and contrast helps create a remarkably eerie scene.

6. Booku Saya Studio

Soft, feathered brush strokes and a palette of pastels bring illustrator Nasaya Mafaridik's dream studio to life. She says, “I always dream [I’ll] have a book bus, because I love books, I love to travel...what’s more exciting than to draw on a moving book bus? What a dream!” Her project is  Mafaridik's first venture into Adobe Fresco, and she says she looks forward to building upon the skillset she learned in Feng’s class.

7. Be afraid and do it anyway

The art deco spin that student Kate Dunne put on her Lettering & Florals project makes us eager to ring in the 2020s. Though she  used only three colors — muted brick red, creamy beige, and matte teal — Dunne was still able to create a rich and complex picture, with fanned florals and buds offering a creative spin on Dylan Mierzwinksi’s botanical lettering project assignment. .

8. Water stitch and oils

Jo Barnes demonstrates that mixed media can exist even within a digital project  via Fresco’s water stitch and oils tools. The finished collage, with it’s piercing eyes, shifted jaw and lis and effortlessly placed strokes of watercolor gives her piece a dreamlike, as well as piecemeal, quality. 

9. Sunny dream studio

XinHui Ma embraces primary hues and crayon-like texture in the dream studio project that she brought to life for  Feng’s Adobe Fresco class. “Idealistically, I would like to be minimalistic about my space and working analog in nature but, in reality, I'm strapped on to my Cintiq every day, since I mainly working as an animator,” she writes. It’s not lost on us that she was able to create a sense of being untethered through her rendering of  both a leaning ladder and the stack of books that puts her near-adjacent to the sun.

10. Collage & character

Michelle Goggins took creative liberty in Armstrong's Abstract Art Class by using  a photo of a piece of fabric she designed as the centerpiece for an alligator-like creature she created. The fabric’s faded hue and scratched surface add a tactile quality that gives her work more depth and texture.

11. Treehouse Studio  

We’re waiting on our invitation to Yena Lee’s dream studio, a peaceful treehouse (complete with tea and napping canine) under a buttery sun. “My dream studio is in a treehouse (I always wanted one as a kid) since I love being amongst the trees. In my imagination, my dog is also very adept at climbing ladders of questionable structural integrity,” she writes. To create the piece, she utilized Feng's technique of using multiplied layers separated by color.

Ready to try your hand at Adobe Fresco, too? Explore all five of Skillshare’s new classes about how to use the digital app by clicking here to begin.