Adobe Fresco Beginners Tutorial and Comparison to Procreate

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome. My name is Doris full. Grab it. And in this class I'm going to show you the ins and outs of adobes, new painting and drawing at fresco. We'll start with an overview of all the buttons and icons, rushes and layer settings before diving in and using it. Here's the caveat. I'm not an illustrator, and my drawing skills are very rudimentary. However, I do love lettering and calligraphy, so I'll be testing the app for that as well. And I know many of you are interested in finding out how fresco and procreate compare. So I'm going to be sharing my thoughts on that, especially the brushes and layer of functions throughout the class. Your project will be to follow along and make your own painting or drawing or lettering piece using fresco. You can then upload a photo to the projects and resource is tab and maybe share a little bit about your process. The APP was developed for the iPad and apple pencil, so that's all we're going to need. And since all the resource is air going to be digital, I think we can skip the hand out for this one. So when you have your I pad and pencil ready, let's get started 2. Download & Homepage: on your iPad. Go to the APP store and search for fresco. Start the download and open the APP. Once it's ready, fresco is available on a Freemium model. If you already have an adobe cloud account, it will ask you for your log in details to sink existing work with the fresco app. If you don't, you can sign up for a free account and use fresco for free for six months if you sign up before December 31st 2019. If you want to keep using it. After that, Adobe Cloud with all the applications costs about $55 per month, and you can also use fresco with a photo shop, single at plan or the fresco at plan for 10 bucks a month. I have a cloud account for my business, so I'll be showing you all the bells and whistles. The first page she'll see is the home page on the home page. You'll have the option to watch tutorials view a gallery of work created by other artists using adobe fresco. View our import previous work from other adobe applications. Have you recently deleted documents or start a new document? Any deleted document can be restored within, I think, 30 days or permanently deleted you can create a new document from two locations. The plus sign on the lower left will pop up a window showing reasoned or saved sizes and digital and print presets. If none of the presets work for your needs, you can create a custom size from the center of the home page. In that pop up window, you have accustomed drawer where you can set the units two pixels inches, centimeters or millimeters. Choose the page orientation, the prince size and DP I dots per inch or dots per centimeter in the background layer can be white or transparent for printed materials. Used at least 300 dp I If you are creating a logo, it's best to have a transparent background that'll save yourself some time later. Having to crop out any white space. I've recently used a four by eight size and a wedding design project for the menu, So if this is the size you use often, go ahead and save it and it will show up in your saved tab. Since we're playing around and getting to know the apt, let's keep it simple and use a digital screen size. I have my iPad horizontally, but it also works vertically, so go with how you usually like toe work. Next up, we're going to look at all the icons in the tool bars. 3. Left Tool Bar: If you've watched my iPhone maker tutorial, you know that I like to start by explaining what all the icons mean first before diving deeper and exploring their individual options and uses. So from top to bottom left to right, let's begin with the tool bars. The home icon gets you back to the homepage. This is the toolbar, and this is the tools option drawer that will change depending on which tool you have selected. Underneath the home button, you have access to three different types of brushes, pixel brushes, live brushes and vector brushes. If your piece needs a variety of brushes and you think you'll have to switch around a lot, you can undock this panel from the toolbar and leave it open anywhere on the screen. Same with the tool options. If you need to change colors, you can undock the color chip as well as the brush auctions and position them where it's most convenient for you. When you're done, click on the X to close it or dragged back into the toolbar. Some tools have the small triangle that indicates there's more variations. Keep it pressed to access them. Fresco comes equipped with over 90 different brushes, and each category contains a number of presets. The ones you are using is highlighted in blue. And to reduce overwhelm, I would suggest that maybe choose a handful to give you some variety, check the star next to them and then have them show up in your favorites tab for quicker access. Each brush comes with a list of corresponding tool options for size, flow and other brush settings. We look at these in more detail in the next video. The eraser icon. That's you correct and refine anything you need. And you can adjust size and capacity off your eraser. Brush in the tool options. The movement. Transform tool that's you. Select everything that is on the layer and move or transform it. You can scale it up or down. Rotate or mirror both vertically and horizontally. Cancel out on the top left or when you're done. Click done on the top right to get back to the layer. With the lasso icon, you can select specific items on your layer and then perform selection actions like transform, erase, mask de select, hide or invert that selection. You can choose whether to have the selection look like marching ants or overly in the anti alias. Ing is a technique where you smooth the jagged, pixelated edges with the color of the pixels around it for a better blend, and it's up to you if you want to use it or not. The lasso icon lets you draw an organic shape or tap your stylist of the screen for straight connective lines. The brush selection tool is for all organic shapes. Each tapping of your pencil will create a separate new point with the square on round selection, you can select rectangular or oval shapes when you go back to the selection tool. Fresco gives you the option to load your last selection again, which might come in handy if you clicked the wrong button by accident. And the tool options lets you choose whether combining or offsetting the paths your selections contain the pain. Bucket fills the layer or selected space with solid color from the color chip. When you click on the corresponding icon for Phil settings, you'll be able to adjust how closely you want the filled to reach the borders. The eyedropper lets you sample any color you have on screen. Move it around to find exactly the shade you need, and you can also use your finger. Just keep it pressed to the screen. The photo icon lets you take a photo import an image from your camera, roll files or creative cloud. To do that, you have to give fresco access to your camera photos and files. The color chip lets you choose different colors by using the wheel. Or if you have a specific HSB value, you can change hue, saturation and brightness with that particular number. Colors you've used will appear in the recent drawer, and you can create your own color palette by choosing the color and adding it to your reasons around the wheel. You also have quick access to pure white, black and clear. 4. Right Tool Bar: on the top right hand side of your screen, you'll see the undo and redo arrow you can also undo by tapping the screen with two fingers and redo with three. The question mark is a link to more information like tutorials, a tour, an overview of gestures and the touch shortcut, which I'll demonstrate a little later. And you'll find Lings to ask for online help or suggest a future. The publisher and export button gives you options to a quick export and send as a message or safe to your files. Publishing export also takes you to a quick export option and export, as lets you change the file name, file format and level of quality before giving you the sending or saving options. You can also export your file as a B hands project, which you can preview before you publish it. Time lapse export creates a screen recording video that shows the process of how your piece came to life, and you can cancel exports by clicking. Cancel in the top left corner and when you're done, click done. The settings or a gear icon gives you information about your current document, like the name and size. You can rename your document here, flip or rotate the canvas Targo, visibility off your touch shortcut button and the our port preview and then upset ings lets you choose your own presets for general items like interface and quick export settings. If you've gone through the tutorials but want to take them again, you can reset your learn content. Input lets you modify your apple pencil sensitivity and what you want to happen when you double tap Europe. A pencil color picker is a favorite option to bring up, but switching between two brushes can also be a great time saver, depending on your workflow. Input also lets you modify what happens when your finger touches the screen. I have set mind to draw with selected brush, but if you prefer your fingers not to interfere with your painting at all, you can set it to gestures. Only the touch shortcut setting is a race with brush, and I'll show you why. When we dive deeper into the brushes, the account tab shows your subscription information and available local storage space as well as creative cloud storage. If you have a connected adobe account about gives you information about the fresco app itself. The version developer updates where you can find them on social media and legal info, and help is another way to access tutorials and app support. Experimental features are yours to choose whether you want to use them or not at the time of filming in early October 2019. Onley Hold for straight line is available if you selected and then draw a line, Hold the pencil down and it will be converted to a straight line after about a second or so lag. It kind of works for curves as well, but I guess it's in beta, so you'll have to play with it and see if that's something you need. If you prefer working on a more minimal interface, press the two arrows to expand and again to go back to the tool bars. Moving to the right hand side of the screen. The first layer icon toggles visibility off the Layer Task bar, and the Layer Properties icon lets you change settings for blend mode and capacity. You can also rename your layers here. The plus sign adds a layer above the active layer. Press on the small triangle and you can choose between a pixel and a vector layer picks. The layers have a pixelated circle, and vector layers have a smooth circle, and the background has an image circle on their side to tell them apart, tap on the layer to access the layer Actions panel, where you can add hide. Delete duplicate copy, cut, merge down, create masks, lock transparency or lock the layer. When a layer is locked, a closed lock indicates that it is to unlock it. Simply tap the layer again and click. Unlock. Hold down on the layer to move it to another location in the layer stack or to combine several layers into a layer group. When you click on the I and toggle visibility across that, I will indicate that the layer is no longer visible in the three dots or ellipses also opened the Layer Actions panel, and I'm going to show you masking examples in a separate video. The touch shortcut changes functions depending on which tool your using when you're using a pixel or vector brush. If you keep the touch point press or double tap toe activated, your pencil will behave as an eraser with that same brush is qualities, and that is really helpful if you're using, For example, the rakes brush used with the live watercolor brush, the touch point pains clear with just water used with the move and transform tool it scales from the center. Used with the lasso tool. It combines both selections or subtracts one selection from the other with the square and round, it constrains proportions to a perfect square and perfect circle with the paint bucket. Hold the touch point first to erase the Phil. This works not just for line drawings but also for watercolor and oil brush strokes. And if you're using, for example, the hard, round brush and erase fill, it could make for an interesting lettering outline. It's pretty pixelated, though. Holding the touch point and double tapping into the layer. Icon toggles visibility. As for gestures, you're probably familiar with the two finger top under three finger top redux, and then you can zoom in and out, rotate and move the canvas using two fingers and a quick pinch motion brings the canvas to fill the screen. Holding your finger down activates the eyedropper tool, and holding down on a triangle reveals more options and with that, we have had a quick look at all the icons on your new document. In the next video, we'll dive a little deeper into precious. 5. Pixel Brushes: starting with pixel brush is you have a variety of presets available, covering multiple categories and like I suggested before, depending on the piece you want to make, choose your favorites toe. Have quick access to them with pixel brush is when you zoom in, you'll see their edges are pixelated, and if you're used to drawing and photo shopped, they work in the same way. Choose your color from the color chip, moving the cursor around the wheel. Or use sliders to adjust hue, saturation and brightness. Fresco gives you easy access to true white, black and transparent in the discs around the wheel. A number of recent colors you used will appear at the bottom. If you like to set a color palette for a piece, pick a color and tap on the plus sign toe. Added to the recent store. Choose your brush size from the tool's options. Fresco is designed for the apple pencil, so some brushes will give you contrast in your strokes, depending on how much pressure you put on the pencil, color flow basically controls how much color is on your virtual brush, so the more pigment you use, the richer the color is going to be. Use the smoothing tool to help refine your lines and curves compared to the streamline option and procreate brushes. If you set the smoothing tool toe high, there is significant lag, and the line draws super slowly. Procreate brushes are way more responsive, even at 100% streamline. You can change blend mode, either in the brush settings or later by drawing on different layers. The list is quite long, so I suggest you play with it. I prepared an overview of all the blend modes across a darker and a lighter color here, so you see how your line might change. Once the two colors interact in shape dynamics, you can change jitter size and control for pressure, tilt and fade. This will depend on how you usually hold the pen, whether it's more pointy on the page or more flat and how much pressure you usually use. So again you're going Teoh. Play with that and find the settings that work for you. Fade lets you adjust how the stroke tapers out and for my purposes. Now I don't have to change any of thes settings, so I'll tap on the back arrow to reset to default, setting 6. Make your own brush: you can add new brushes by clicking on the plus sign. You can download sets through your adobe, four to shop or a cloud subscription. Kyle T. Webster is famous for his photo shop brushes, and you can access his gallery through photo shop. Just be warned that fresco currently does not let you reorder or delete any brushes, so if you import 50 brushes from a set at a time, they will appear alphabetically in your library. You can also import a new brush from your own files, creating your own brushes not as intuitive as it is and procreate, where you can mix and match shapes and grains from an existing library. Having said that, you can use adobe capture from your iPad or iPhone. So quick tangent Adobe Capture is available in the APP store as a free download. With capture, you can turn images into a variety of assets like shapes, textures and brush is that you can use in other adobe applications like fresco, photo shop or illustrator To use capture. To make a brush, you have to give it access to your camera. Say you want to make a heart brush or a flower brush. Draw that Stam open capture, click on brushes and take a photo off your drawing. Once you have the image cropped, cleaned it up and chosen the settings you want. Click safe from the assets library. Click on the Eclipsys or choose the brush and export as an dot a B R file. Remember to name it. Save it to your favorite destination. Now go back into fresco. Click on add brush from files, find your destination and see it show up under your library of brushes. You can see I have tested this once or twice, and both brushes were added individually with her own library setting as well. Here's another thing Fresco needs to improve. It is currently not possible to reorder, rename or even delete any brushes You important. 7. Live Brushes: This is where Adobe has really hit it out of the park. And if you're a fine artist or painter, you're going to love what this app can do to quickly again. Compared to procreate, I'm using version 4.3 point eight of procreate, and its water color options aren't nearly as realistic. I'm really looking forward to the update appropriate five becoming available later this year, and I'm curious to see if they're going to try and compete with rescue in this arena. I think they're probably putting more emphasis on motion graphics and animating drawings, to be honest, but we'll see either way. Adobe Sketch already usedto have better watercolor than procreate, and adobe fresco just took it one step further. So let's take a look. You get four watercolor and seven oil brushes to play with. The soft watercolor brush also responds to pressure, so the more you press, the more color comes out. You can change color, size and flow just like the pixel brushes. The watercolor brush has an additional setting for water flow to simulate how wet your brushes. So to do a digital wet on wet technique, you can either hold the touch point or slide the color down to transparent up the water flow and laid down a layer of water. Then pick a color and drop it in. To get a blooming effect, lower the water flow and painters. If the brush was nearly dry, your watercolors will behave as if they're wet at all times, so you can always go back and add more detail and see how the colors mix. And just for the record, the mixing of colors is also realistic. So you do get an orange when you mix yellow and red. When you're done, you can tell the layer to dry from the layer options menu and then keep building as if on a dry your canvas. You can adjust your watercolor brush settings also by angle, spacing and scatter and control for shape, pressure and velocity dynamics again, for my purposes, the default settings air helpful enough. So that's what I'll use. But I encourage you to play with it now for the oil brushes. They also look so riel. If you follow along, I am picking a light color, a good size and loading up my brush with a good amount of pigment can you see the bristles and how the oil is mounting up. The next icon controls color mixing, so let's choose another color and set the mix too high. See how it drags the previous color with it. And then, if I keep going, that's the mixed color that's on the brush. If we lower the mixed value, the second color won't mix with the first, and the brush will stay clean. In the tool settings. You can play with the angle of the brush and decide to use canvas texture. This is useful for an extra realistic touch, because if you brush oil paint on ever so lightly, you'll see it catching on just the texture off the canvas, as opposed to kind of looking, streaking and blotchy. Unfortunately, this canvas setting is only available for oil brushes. It would have been great to have that for other brushes as well. You also have options for pressure and velocity dynamics, which again I'm not going to touch. But reloading color might come in handy if you have reload turned off and mixing set too high. That makes color is how your brush is going to continue. If you have reload turned on. Even if you have mixing set too high, it will be as if you wash your brush to continue with the clean value. 8. Vector Brushes: Here's the other thing. Adobe fresco offers that procreate does not have vector brushes. You'll notice your layer changes to a vector layer once you use them. There is a round disk on the edge of the layer to denote what it is, and if you switch to a pixel brush, it will write on a pixel layer or create a new one. You can change color, size and smoothing. As with the pixel brushes and vector brush. Settings also lets you edit shape, angle, taper pressure and velocity dynamics to adapt to your needs. Vector brushes, as opposed to pixel brushes, are mathematically constructed. The stroke is mathematically constructed so the edges will always be smooth. No matter how closely you zoom in, you want to use a vector brush if you make a logo that is going to appear on a banner the size of building or in general, if you want your piece to look very crisp and neat and clean, let's now put it all together and create a piece using all three kinds of brushes 9. Brushes Project: I'm going to start with a watercolor wash background and then add some line drawings and details with pixel and vector brushes. First, I'll open a new document and create the color palette I want to use. I downloaded a photo from unspool ash and used the eyedropper to pick up colors for the main components. Next, I lower the A. Pass it e of the photo layer in the layer options and lock the layer to make sure I don't mess with it accidentally. Starting with the watercolor brush, I'm going to blend the darker to the lighter blues to make the sky to smooth the blend lines. I'm going to de saturate my color up the water flow and go over the seams again for a live watercolor action. Fresco really has better brushes than procreate, but Fresco does not have smudging, which I think might have worked here as well. On a separate layer, I'm going to change to a pixel brush from the effects category called Clouds Soft with a white color selected, I'm painting in some happy clouds and let's at this point get in the habit of naming our layers. So the photo was the photo of the skies, the sky and the clouds are the clouds. It'll help to know what's on each layer. If I exported into Photoshopped to work with it more later, now the mountain range. I think I'll draw the peaks first and then add the snow In afterwards, I'll use a vector brush to get precise lines and then fill it in with the flat canvas brush from the painting drawer. It has a nice ruff bristle optic, and I like how it brushes in some canvas texture. Now to align the pieces a little better, I'm going to move my mountains up a bit and then use the touch point to convert my canvas brush into an eraser so I can erase some of the watercolor sky with exactly the same texture as the mountaintop. If I want to move the mountain and the snow together, I have to group the two layers because I can select them both toe ungroomed them. I'm going to tap on the stack and select one group and to give it an extra touch. Because I saw that brushing the effects folder. I'm going to add just a bit of starry sky and call it done. In the end, I'm not sure if the vector lines are needed, but there you go. I'm just playing around. So I'm going to leave it at this. In the next video, we're going to look at layers and masking. 10. Layer Masking Project: to demonstrate the layer features. I'm going to go ahead and do our next project at the same time. I'm going to start with a watercolor wash as a background, and then I'm going to let her a word on top of it. This is the background done. So now let's go into the layer options and select Create empty mask. A mask lets you change the appearance of the things on your layer without permanently damaging or changing thumb. If you made a mistake or change your mind, you can turn off the mask and have the layer be back as it was before. Fresco has connected the mask to that some nail of your layer, and you can swipe left or right to see them both. The small daughter on the right hand side tells you that there is a mask behind it. I am used to seeing both layer and masks stacked like procreate shows it, but we can work with this. On that mask. You can hide or reveal the connected layers contents. If you're familiar with masking in 40 shop or procreate, you know that black conceals and white reveals. In other words, if you go over the layers contents with the black colored brush, you will hide the content. If you have accidentally taken away too much, you can use the white color brush and paint it back in frescoes. Hide and reveal does not depend on what color chip you set it to. It seems to work by simply erasing and reconstructing. If you have read overly selected, whatever you hide will show up as a red area. If you have on layer selected, it will show the colors and textures from any layers underneath it. So if you have a white background that will be white and if it's yellow, well, you get the idea. With the layer mosque selected, you can tap on it and see layer mask actions where you can invert the selection to get a lettering. Peace with the nice Grady and Effect and the task bar also changed and now gives you the option to quickly hide the layer or unlinked it. If I'm drawing something in procreate and I want to add some textures to only the shapes on my layer, I can Alfa locket choose my brush and color and brush in some grain or noise or I add a clipping mask to easily add shadows and highlights to give a piece a more three dimensional feel. Fresco does not have Alfa lock or clipping masks, so it's a little bit more complicated from the Layer Actions panel. I can mask, layer contents and then choose a grainy brush like dusty from the FX category and hide some of my master items on the layer. No matter what color my brushes said to hide means a race or take away for fresco. So again I can add a shadow or a different color just to what's on this layer. I'm only hiding, so whatever color or pattern is underneath will shine through. If I want that particular mask to look like a shadow, I have to add a new layer on top, use a darker color and brush in the effect I'm looking for. And to make sure they overlap, I have to erase anything that went beyond the boundary of the layer below. Something that many artists are going to look forward to in the next fresco update will be the ability to re color a layer again. Procreate makes it quite easy with the adjustment options. But re coloring a layer is not possible in fresco right now, something that comic book artists and letters might look forward to in is a text option, which procreate has added in their last update, and it's really quite handy for a lot of lettering options. In particular, you can't clear layer contents in fresco, either. If you want to start a fresh, you have to either make clear, invisible or delete it and start a new one. 11. Recap & Thank you: Okay, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. So just to recap, fresco is going to be free for six months if you order it before December 31st. After that, you can have access to all the premium features. For $10 a month, you will need to create an adobe account if you don't have one already, and then you'll be able to share your projects with the B hands community, and that has over 10 million members. Procreate costs $10. I think one time and then you own it. You can join their community at procreate, thought art, where you can also share your portfolio and discover new artists. This community is integrated with their website, and you can also read their blawg and find out anything you want about the new updates. Fresco has amazingly realistic watercolor and oil brushes as well as vector brushes. But right now for me, I found that the brush strokes lag very much when you up the smooth tool to 100%. And the brushes in general are not as easy to download or edit or, you know, import as they are with procreate. Maybe it's because I don't have a design degree and I didn't grow up using photo shop. But I find pro creates interface, especially the layer functions a lot easier to handle. I am used to using procreate and being able to swipe on the thumbnail and performing some layer actions like duplicating and deleting and moving them around. Fresco also does not have some of thieve ery important layer functions that procreate has like clipping masks or re coloring options or adding text. Yet this is just the first version of fresco we're working with, and the developers are asking for suggestions and input. So I'm looking forward to seeing what the next updates will bring. One more thing about the brushes in fresco. You can delete or rename or reorder them or customize them as easily as you can in procreate. And to delete a document, you also have to go in to your iCloud documents and then click on the ellipses to delete it , so that all seems a little clumsy. However, if you use different applications, more applications from the adobe sweet like photo shop or illustrator or capture, you're going to find that fresco integrates seamless me. You'll be able to switch from your iPad and work on your desktop or laptop computer to finish this assignment that you have, and I can see how fresco is a great addition for those design projects where you need an extra piece of painted or illustrated material. Overall, I find both fresco and procreate very impressive applications, and they both have their uniquely attractive design features. Fresco, I believe, is probably more suited for painters and illustrators and fine artists who would like to take their practice into the digital world. Or like I mentioned before, if you're a designer who was already familiar with the rest of Theodore, be sweet. Procreate makes currently a little more sense for someone like me, who is primarily working with texts and phones and scripts. But I can see how making a watercolor background for a lettering, peace and in fresco and then bringing it into procreate to add the script and the handwriting would be a combination of the best of both worlds. But that's just me. So I am looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Please share your projects with the class. If you share it on social media, you can tag me and use the hash tag. Just pick up a pen. That's it for me. Thank you so much for learning with me. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please let me know what you thought of the glass. I love to hear feedback Click on my profile to see more courses that I'm teaching here on skill share, and I hope to see you in another class soon.