Transcripts
1. Introduction: Art brings joy to so many people when they're not even realizing. If you go to the grocery store and see a package, that's fun. I think that is like a way that art as part of everybody's lives, even if they aren't always necessarily noticing or seeing the artist that created it. Hi, I'm Molly Egan an illustrator based in South Philadelphia. Today's class is about using Adobe Fresco to create a portrait inspired by a vintage photo. Adobe Fresco is a drawing and painting app for the iPad. I like Fresco mostly because of the live brushes, because they help me give a very traditional feel to my digital artwork. A lot of my work is painted traditionally, especially in my sketch books, but with Adobe Fresco I've actually been starting to use the program for my client work as well. So many digital programs, I never really quite got the traditional feel that my pad work has, and this was really the first program that I was, "Yeah, this feels like my paintings." In this class, we'll be talking about my illustration process from start to finish. You'll learn how to interpret a photograph, choose a color palette, and make a final piece. So if you take anything away from this class, I really hope that you realize to just enjoy what you've made. You don't necessarily have to make work exactly the way that I do, but I think that there's something in this class that everyone can learn. Thanks for joining the class. Let's get started.
2. Art and Joy: Sketchbooks and art, in general, have always been a way for me to escape things. It's not just what's going on in the news, it's also what's going on with my personal life sometimes. Maybe I have a bad day, maybe my dog had an accident in the house, maybe I had a disagreement about an assignment. Channeling that frustration into my personal work always really seems to help me. I really don't find the need for all art to be really conceptual. I had a hard time with this when I was in college, I really wanted to be that brainy, political, commentator, sort of illustrator, and I realized as I got older that that just wasn't really for me and that's totally okay. Conceptual means is like a metaphor but in picture form. So I feel like when I realized that I didn't need to be a conceptual artist and I could just make work that's more about having fun, I felt that people started to really respond to my work and realized that they too didn't really have to make work that was conceptual. Anytime I talk to students, I always try to encourage them to make what they want to make and not make what they think they should make. I think art is so important for everyone because even if you're not an artist, I still think it can be an escape for you, I still think that there's a lot that you can learn and have fun doing.
3. Using Live Watercolor Brushes: In this lesson, I'll be walking you through the live brushes in Fresco. So first, we will open Adobe Fresco and I normally like to make an eight by eight canvas. That's a nice size for Instagram. You also want to make sure that you're doing your files at 300 PPI, which is points per inch. That does a nice print size file. First, I'll be showing you the live watercolor brushes. So to locate the live brushes, they're over here. So there is a selection of watercolor brushes, which we'll try out first. We'll start with the watercolor round detail. So you can see it better, I normally like to make it brighter color because you can see the wash and textures a little bit better than the lighter colors. So over here is just the size, then this is the water flow. So the higher you have this slider up, the more water is in the brush, which you can see here. If I put it down to zero, you can see that the paint isn't quite moving as much. In the middle, you can see there's a little bit more water. I like doing full water flow because that's in my opinion the purpose of these brushes. So you can also play with the flow of paint. So basically, that means there's barely any paint and you're just painting with water or lots of paint. I like to do it somewhat in the middle so you can get a nice buildup like you would with watercolor. You can see with having the water up high how nice that adds in. You can do shapes adjacent and you can see how the water starts to connect them together. The round detail brush is one of my favorites. I think it's good for pretty much anything. But I also really like the wash soft, there's a little bit more texture in this one. It feels a little bit more like watercolor to me. Again, I like bringing this flow down a bit because then you can get some overlapping textures, and I like putting the water all the way up. You can see how things are overlapping there and really start to look like watercolor. Now as I'm pressing, I'm releasing more and more paint into the shape. I love in these areas how you can see that there's a less concentration of paint on the edges and more paint in the center. What's so cool about this brush is that they always stay wet. So even these ones that I did earlier, I can go back in and add some variation. Just some nice texture that I think is inherent to a traditional work typically but I think works really well on this program. With pressure, here I'm pressing pretty lightly. You can see I'm getting a pretty light wash, but now I'm going to start pressing harder. You can see that that makes the paint darker and more opaque. For me, I normally just do really light shapes and then I just lightly press into those shapes to get darker colors. For me, that feels more like watercolor. The watercolor wash flat is really nice for backgrounds. So you can make the brush quite large. You can see how that would be a really nice backdrop for a watercolor painting. Then there's a watercolor wet splatter. You can get some interesting splatter texture if that's your thing. I normally just like the wash more than I like the splatter. Since I had mentioned that the watercolor always stays wet, if you do it on top, you do get nice blending if that's what you want. But if it's not what you want, you can just put it on another layer and then it'll stay nice and crisp for you. So you also have the option, instead of making a new layer like I did previously, you can also go into the preferences and do dry layer. Then you can go on top with another brush and it won't mix with that previous paint. Doing another layer works too. But if you have a file that has many, many layers, it is nice to have that option.
4. Using Live Oil Brushes: So those were the watercolor brushes and now we're going to move on to the oils. So we're starting out with oilpaint flat brush, and there are some options that are definitely worth taking a look at, particularly the Canvas texture. So you can see in this graph there's a bit of a canvas texture, especially like in this area you can see that. So here you can see that that texture is and really happening as much, and here you can see the canvas, and then here's one without that texture, just my preference. You're welcome to do whatever you'd like. So now I'm moving on to the oilpaint round which is one of my favorites, and the brushes that I use in my studio traditionally, I almost always use round brushes, so for me is just what I must comfortable using. Again, I've turned the canvas texture off because for me it's just my preference. Let's zoom in here a little bit, you can see it just like the knights stroke that it's getting. You can just keep building and building, which I think is really cool. Also another thing I want to know is the flow. So the higher the flow, the more paints coming out. So you can see this one looks a little bit chunkier. If you come down right here, you can see that it's more of a transparent paint, almost looks like glazed like. I like to keep mine somewhere like the 70s. I find that when it's at so slow the edge isn't always quite the way I want it, it can look a little bit choppy or a little bit harsh. I think that you get a little bit nicer transparency this way. So now moving on to the filbert brush. Filbert brushes are like flat brushes, but they have a rounded top. You can see how since my work as a lot of circular shape, the flatter rectangular brushes aren't really as good of a fit for me, but if you're working on a lot of geometric shapes with hard edges, they might be a perfect fit for you. Now I'll move into the oilpaint detail. I use the detail brush not only for just details, I'll do a little comparison here between the detail brush and the round so you can see the difference in the texture of the paint. So the detail brush is a little bit more pressure sensitive, whereas the round still is but not quite as dramatically. So those both are my favorites, so the ones that I use by far the most. Then we will move into the glaze. So glaze is in oil or more so to add layers of color to be little like an underpainting. Since I mostly painting like acrylic and wash in acrylic wash, I don't really use this feature too much, but if you ever wanted to do an underpainting and then do glazes on top, this would be the use for it, but for me, I normally just use it as the occasional background texture. It's a little bit flatter, but you still are getting some nice brush strokes in there. So now I'm going to select the next brush. Oilpaint chunky, really nice brush if you want texture. It's a little bit of a flatter brush, but you can see the really nice texture you can get with these. They're really built well on top of each other too. You can see here too with the flow, how that really changes the chunkiness of the brush here too. Yes, again, this is a nice one for backgrounds. To show you the last one, oilpaint short. More minimal texture, which I think can be nice for backgrounds. You can make it nice and large so it's easier to cover a lot of space. I really encourage you to play around with the brushes for awhile, see which ones feel comfortable to you, especially with the oil since there's differences in brush shape. You might like one more than you like the other. So I definitely encourage you to play around before you start committing to the project.
5. Finding a Reference Photo: So for the project, we will be making a piece based on a vintage photograph. So the first step is to find the photograph that you'd like to use for your project. I have a board on Pinterest that has a bunch of different options for you to choose from or you can choose your own. So when I'm looking for reference photos, I always try to find interesting shapes in them, whether it would be an interesting pair of sunglasses, interesting hair shape and then I use those as inspiration to make my own stylized portraits. So now we're going to go into Pinterest and you can see here that I have a reference board, have some starter reference for you to pick out. You can see a lot of mostly women because that's what I like to draw personally. You can see here some fun coats, interesting hats. I like vintage photos since I feel like a lot of women had really interesting big hair back them that doesn't really exist as much now. I really like these ladies just because the hair styles, honestly, I've never really seen anything like this in real life, but I wish that I could. I really like the lady on the left in particular. I really love that kind of like dome shape where almost looks like she's wearing like a hair hat. Another interesting photo here like the hat is a lot of the focus, but she still has really interesting shapes in her hair. I think her body is at a really interesting shape and you can see how it's kind of like an asymmetrical pose where her head is in one part of the composition and her body kind of goes over and I think those compositional tricks are interesting to use in an illustration, kind of moves your eye around. So when I'm looking at photos, you can see here that almost all of them have really interesting shapes. So in this photo I was really drawn more sort of the shapes of the clothes. So this might be a photo that I would use as like a close reference, maybe a face reference. But then I might go to this photo and use the hat from this photo and put it on this girl because it's just mixed matching of shapes to make something as active and interesting as possible. So I was between two women that had really interesting glasses, I guess say ended up being like catty-corner from each other which is interesting. The first lady, really like her earrings and the flowers in her hands, just the shape of her hair. For her I like her glasses shape and I also like the hair shape and I think her grumpy expression is really funny. So I have both of these photos saved to my camera roll and I will be opening them in fresco to use for reference. So now, it's your turn to find your reference photo. Remember when you're looking for photos to try to find ones that have interesting shapes that you can stylize in your portrait. If you're not sure where to start, feel free to check out my Pinterest board.
6. Sketching and Refining: So now, we're going to start sketching. I always like to start with a very loose sketch, and then I get tighter as I keep going on. The first thing I'm going to do is bring in both the reference photos. So you just go over here, this little graph, I can go into a camera roll and grab these two ladies. I like having them not on my canvas and rather on the side. So if you go over the move tool, you can just put them both to side. I'm going to make her a little bit bigger, so she's the same size as the grumpy lady. Now, I have a pretty good setup to start sketching. For sketching, I always like to sketch in black and I actually don't like to use the live brushes for this part. I just prefer to use the most basic hard round brush. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm focusing more on this woman, but I like the three-quarter profile view of her. So it's a mixture between both of them. So really, really rough. Her ears will go somewhere in here. This will be like the bang part of the hair. This is like the top part. I don't what you call that, bouffant, maybe puffy business. I call it puffy business. Now, I'm going to move down into the neck, then I'm going to add some shoulders in there. Even though you probably wouldn't see her other ear, I think I might give her some fun earrings or something. So for right now, I'm going to put the other ear in there. Then I'm going to zoom in a little bit to get some more of the detail of the face. Her nose would be somewhere in there and focusing on this like really dramatic cat eye glasses. So I'm going to make this pretty large and they'll be somewhere in here, is getting lost in this sketch of this, quite sloppy, but that's okay, we'll fix it. I'm looking at this and I'm seeing a lot of dead space in this area. So I think that both of these photos are more of a portrait style than a square. So they have a lot of active space. But when you move it into a square, it does get a little bit dead. So I think instead of just doing this little puff on top, I think I'm going to give her some hair to the side too. You can see how it just fills in the space a little bit more. I'll be adding a background pattern in too, but I think this still is just nice to have. So now that I have my loose drawing done, I'm going to do a tighter drawing on top. I'm going to go over these settings and I'm going to make the opacity a lot lower. I'm really thinking about shape here. So you can see pretty much all of these shapes are circles. Even her glasses are ovular and circular. Her lips will most likely be a circle. So I'm going to use this shape-based drawing as a guide for the lines I'm going to put down. I know I mentioned previously that I've seen about putting an ear there, but I think now that I have that extra plus plus hair, I'm probably going to forego that. I'm actually going to make my brush a little bit smaller, since I'm working on more detail. This part of her face, so I'm going to add in that fringe or bang shape. You see the reference there, I'm looking at this. Now, I'll add in that ear, and look how it connects to the head. I'm using this big circular shape as a guide for where her hair is going to end, and more like ovals for this part of the hair. Now, I'm going to add in her neck. I was thinking about the color of her shirt. I think I want to do something that looks freely. So since this drawing is still pretty loose, I'll probably end up doing another drawing that's a little bit tighter on top of it. I suggest that you just do as many drawings as you need to, to get the one that you want. I noticed with this drawing that I want to make it more about the face, and especially since there will be glasses in here. I'm thinking this space is a little small. So we're just going to adjust a little bit. It's going to end up changing the hair shape, because I don't want it to be touching the edges too and that's okay. So now, I'm going to start doing the face. I'm going to add in these cut eye glasses. So I'm going to turn that guide back on. I want to make it even a little bit less opaque. I'm going to add in a nose and lips. I really want to make sure that these are dramatic and interesting. I really like the impact that these big shapes can have. So I just feel like since they're overtaking so much of the composition, you can get some really interesting, even negative space in them. Looking at a portrait like this could feel really intimidating, but once you break it down until this is an oval and then this is an oval on top of her head and then her ears are ovals, becomes a lot less intimidating to think about it that way. So now, I can really get rid of this really loose on because I'm not really going to need it anymore. Again, I'm just going to go over to the adjustments and turn down that opacity, and make another layer. Now, we'll be getting into the, what's hopefully, the final drawing. For a lot of these curves, I find it a little bit difficult to draw a curve like this. So use the digital properties to your advantage. To make this line, I find it a little bit easier to have something curved down than have to draw a curve up. So I'll just constantly shift my canvas around to make it the easiest possible position for my shape drawing, my line drawing. Now, this is when I'm going to fix that hair that is getting a little bit too close to the edge, now that I made her head a little bit bigger. I always like to turn my guide layer off and on, just so I can see if I'm on the right track, and that's something about how I want it. Now, I'm going to move into the rest of her head, just a little neck detail. I just have a vision of what I think looks right. With her eyes, I'm trying to make sure that they are somewhat in line. The glasses, I want them to be somewhat symmetrical. With her hair too, I'm looking at these two shapes and being like, are they comparable? Do they make sense together? Even still I'm seeing this shape could probably be a little bit higher, so it matches that shape a little bit better. It's just training your eye to be bopping around the whole drawing as much as possible. Not really focusing on one area too much, just trying to look at how each area relates to the whole. Yeah, and definitely the more that you draw, the better that you get at noticing these little differences and things. Many of the things I'm mentioning, you don't see, but you might see better in your own drawing, and that's totally fine. So now, I'm going to get into the glasses, which is the trickier bit. Probably just going to do the glasses on a separate layer actually. So it's not interacting with these so if I make a mistake, it's a lot easier to correct. So when you're drawing, really just trust yourself. If it doesn't look quite right to you keep working on it until it feels right. Things don't have to be absolutely perfect. Again, you're going to be tracing over this with the live brushes anyway. So you just want to get it to a point where you think it's going to be a good reference for yourself. I'm feeling that her face looks a little bit wide and not quite how I like it. So I'm just going to use this transform tool, to bring it in a little bit. It's a very slight difference, but for me, I see the difference. Even thought this is like a pretty final looking drawing, I decided that I wanted to change a few things. So I had her nose this style, but I actually think I want to make it a little bit of a different shape. since so many of the rest of the shapes in this piece are circular. Think kind of a more curvy nose rather than something so like line bases now work a little bit better. So that to me just fits the piece a little bit better. I think both were fine, but I like this little bar. I also think that her phase is just getting a little bit scrunched. So I'm just going to move this part of her hair up a little bit. Again, just using the marquee tool to all these things. I think this will allow me to just make her face in general a little bit higher and larger. I think that will help make it a little bit more of the focus rather than it being all about the hair. The portrait in the face is really the most interesting part for me to draw. Some of the other glasses are still feeling a little bit off to me, but I think it's just mostly shape that I'll end up correcting in the final. I think I might just color this in so I can build the shape a little bit more easily. So I think when I get really focused on the line, rather than focusing on shapes, sometimes it can be really hard for me to see the issues. You can't really see the point now because it's blending into the arm of the glasses, but I'll probably add a line in there to make that be separate. So now, I'm just going to do some very, very loose ideas for the pattern I'm going to add into here. It's more so to just get an idea of where small patterns are going to be, where big patterns are going to be, because you don't really want all patterns to be the same exact size. Then I'm going to continue on with the circle theme and do some polka dots in her hair. So now I've finished my sketch and it's your turn to do yours. After that, we'll be exploring different colors to treat your piece.
7. Choosing a Color Palette: So now that you have a sketch, you can start working on the fun part which was color. So I think it's best if you pick one color that you know you really want to use. Maybe your favorite color's blue. Then we can figure out a way to incorporate that well with other colors, with that as the main color. If you're having a hard time figuring out which colors you want to use, I think looking at reference even for color can be really helpful. A huge inspiration for me as retro textiles, I like looking at ones from the '60s and '70s. There's a lot of interesting color palette there. So if you're having a hard time, that might be a nice jumping off point for you. So I like to add a new layer right underneath my drawing. The main thing I'm thinking about is I really feel like I want her hair to be mint green. So I'm going to go with that first. That's my main color that I know I definitely want to incorporate and can make the brush a little bit bigger. You don't really have to worry about coloring and the lines or anything too much because we're basically going to be coloring the whole thing over again when we go into the live brushes, this is just for us to quickly have a plan. Now that I have that green that I like, I'm going to start thinking about some colors that relate to it. So you can see the color wheel here. Things that are directly across our color opposites and that means that they too are eyes. They go well together. So orange and blue, green and red, purple and yellow. All of those are kind of a good jumping off point for you to start. Since I have the green, I'm definitely going to incorporate some red. I'm going to do the features of her face first. I'm going to do them on a new layer. I can always merge them later. I'm going to do red cheeks and then a little bit more of like a mob the colored lip. For the background, I'm thinking that I want it to be close to the green but also contrasting. I'm going to try to yellow first and see how that goes. See how I like it. The black can be distracting sometimes to actually see the contrast between the color. So sometimes I turn it off and you can see here that the yellow is actually really close to the green. So I don't think that these colors work that well together. So when I was going with the green, I was thinking I either go into the yellow family or into the blue family. Now, I'm going to have to go into the blue family instead and try that out. But instead of making it a light color, which again is going to have contrast issues with the green, I'm going to try and making it a little bit darker and then use the paint can to just test that out. I really want the background to contrast with the hair because otherwise she'll blend into the background and she won't really be standing out. I think low contrasts work can work well sometimes, but I just want to make sure that the colors are going well together and there's a balance. So I think I'm going to leave her face just white because I think I'm going to actually end up having the glasses be black. I think that'll be some really nice contrast in there. A lot of this is like playing around and coming up with things as you go just goes organically. I'm actually thinking this pink is a little bit too dusty. Think I went a little bit more vibrant. You can see up here these are the most saturated colors. Again, just use the paint bucket and you can see like that made a big difference, made it a lot more vibrant. I think I might actually do the same thing with the background. It's still dark enough, so it should still have contrast from the hair, but it has a little bit more punch to it. You can probably see the difference in like this blue and green compared to when I was doing the green and the yellow. I ended up making the blue just a touch darker just to enhance the contrast a little bit more. Now, I'm going to start thinking about what color I want the patterns to be. I think in the pattern, her shirt will probably just be like little black stripes or polka dots. Her hair exploring that in my mind, I'm not 100 percent sure. You could give maybe a darker green ago and I don't know if the darker green for me. Then we can make it a little bit more punchy and fun. So I actually think I'm going to make this color a little bit lighter. So then if we put other colors on top, they'll stand out a little bit more. Again, you can see like the contrast is much better between the background now too. So I'm going to make some of them red, some of them pink, and actually maybe the ones that aren't touching her face could be white. So with the way that I'm working with color right now, I wouldn't say that there's necessarily strategy towards it. It's what looks good to my eye. I started with the opposites as a guide. Then because blue is close to green, I knew that it would relate well. Then I'm experimenting from there. So now I'm going to start thinking about what color the pattern in the background will be. So I'm going to try maybe that mint green that I used to have in the hair. So a nice feature about Fresco that once you select a color or make the color in the color wheel, actually saves that down here in recent swatches. So it's nice that when we go into the final, every color that we've used will actually be there waiting for us. I think I'm going to mess around this blue little bit. Something about it just isn't really what I want. So I'm going to try yellow again, but making it more of like an orange yellow. Yeah. So a little bit more of what I was thinking. So now I'm thinking that yellow that I originally wanted could maybe work well as these little Paisley elements. Then I might end up making some of those dots in the hair that color as well. I like putting every color and the composition at least a couple of times because I think that it helps add to the overall continuity of a piece. I know I said mint green was the color I really wanted to use. I'm just going to give it a shot with blue, just see if I might like that a little bit better. I actually think I do. So because the blue and orange are color opposites, I think it looks better to my eye. So now that I've experimental the color, now it's your turn to do the same thing. Now we're ready to paint.
8. Laying Down Base Colors: Now that we have a sketch and have chosen our colors, we're ready to start on the final with a live brushes. So I like to start by flattening my entire sketch and color study into one layer. Just makes it a little bit easier to reference and it makes it so you don't have tons of layers. Now I also like to make a palette. We have a lot of colors going on and I want them to all be in a row so they're easy to access because a lot of the colors down here I ended up not using. So the blue is right there. So I don't have to do that again, but I'm just going to add in the pink and red, the orange or the yellowy orange. I'm using the eyedropper tool to select all of these color for my palate. So now that we have all the colors, I'm again going to put this at a low opacity, so I can draw on top of it. This is actually a very similar to my traditional process because I do all my paintings on a light table. Even though I'm working digitally, I'm essentially doing the same thing. So since the hair is taking over most of the real estate here, for me, it makes most sense to start with that shape. So I'm going to use the oil paint round brush, have my settings the way I want them. Want to do paint mix at zero, and want to have my flowed about 75 and see how that goes and I'm actually going to make the brush slightly larger so I can cover more space at time, is going to rotate a little bit. I'm just going to start with the outline. What's nice that you can do in frescoes, which if you go a little bit over where you wanted to go, you can just erase it where regular paint, you can't really do that. So now is really the time where I'm trying to focus on getting the curves exactly the way I want them. Where even in the sketch, I was trying to get them pretty close, but now I want them exactly how I want them to look in the final. So this area is a little bit finer details. So I'm going to bring my brush down a little bit, bring in like a almost like a sideburns type of shape that we all have and I'll round that out. I'll turn this layer off just so I can get, I'm going to turn that layer back on actually. So I want to turn it off and just evaluate how I think the curves are looking. I think for the most part they look pretty good. I think I needed to do a little bit more on top of here, but I think you can tell even more once you start sealing everything in. So I'm going to take a really big brush and I am trying to focus my stroke so it's naturally going how the hair would flow. I think it's nice to follow the curves of the shape you're making. It really looks more like it was painted. It also looks more like hair. At times, I'm adjusting the size of the brush just because, it's just a little bit easier to fit in with a small brush, and honestly, I would probably be doing some brush switching with a traditional painting anyway and I like how you get the variation in the stroke where there's some really large brush strokes and small brush strokes. Then since the face is going to be just like Canvas white, I'm going to go in and erase this. Again, just adjusting the size if I needed to do a little bit more finer detail and zooming in. But like I mentioned earlier, I don't like zooming in too, too much because I do still want there to be somewhat like natural variation to what I'm doing. Now I like to bring my drawing on top of that layer so we can see what's going on. Next, I'm going to focus on her shirt. So I'm going to do a layer above with the paint mix, you can technology everything on one layer, but I like to keep them separate just for organization, and it's also really helpful if you decide that you want to change colors later. When I'm coloring in, I always like to turn off that layer, so I can see what I'm doing a little bit better. You can see all the nice texture the brush is. I also like to do sometimes is you can see here, like I use a larger brush aside, a larger space I use smaller brushes in here, so the texture is a little bit different. If you go over to the options here and lock transparency, it makes it so you can only draw where you previously drawn. So then I could go back into a bigger oil brush and smudge out and flatten out those strokes. I don't think it's always a serious, sometimes I like that look, but I do think it's helpful sometimes if you're doing the hair shape and you might have some really odd strokes that wouldn't really nationally come from a brush just because of the angle you did them at, it's nice to bump them down and change them around a little bit. So now I'm going to work on coloring the backgrounds. Don't be afraid to use the eraser as a drawing tool as well. Sometimes it's easier to go in with the eraser and clean things up than do it with a brush. What's really cool about the brush is that even when you erase some, it still acts as a paint stroke, and if [inaudible] I see there's an ellipse to the paint, especially like over here, which is pretty cool. So now I'm going to do the same thing on the other side, and I'm going to have to change the curve of the hair a little bit because I made it go a little bit too far in. So they're not going to match up very well, but it's very easy to fix. I think the best plan of action is to actually adjust the shirt. So I'm going to get rid of that transparency lock that I had on and I'm going to erase this area that makes them neck go here instead. I think this is definitely a point where you're just filling in slats and you're looking at shapes. Most of the hard work is done on the sketch where you've done a lot of the evaluating between size relationships, and the work here should just be using the brushes rather than drawing or completely editing at this point.
9. Painting the Face: So now, I'm going to work on the face. I'm going to use some of the watercolor brushes here. So like the effect, it's like a washy cheek. So we're going to use a watercolor wash soft and go into that red color. I want the water flow to be high here and I also want the flow to be a little bit lower, so I can get a nice buildup of color. So I'm just going to put the general shapes in while I have the guide up. So I find the guides really helpful, but sometimes it makes it a little bit hard to see what you're working on when you're on the final. So it's really easy to be able to turn the layer on and off. Even though we did a color study and did a lot of planning, sometimes you just want to change something and that's totally okay. I made the glasses black and the more I look at them, I find that they're a little bit harsh, and so I wanted to keep them dark to have that contrast. But I think I'm going to choose either do a dark navy blue or dark green to bring color in, rather than just straight black. Just always know that sometimes things just don't go quite to plan when you're working on a final. If you want to change a color, that's the positive aspect of working digitally. So to change colors and keep the texture, it's actually pretty easy. So again, you just want to go into this lock transparency, which we did earlier, and then instead of going in with a live brush to change the color, I'm actually going to go in with the hard round brush that we used to do the sketch. This does a really good job of preserving texture and not changing it. So you can see that all the texture that I put down is still there and printing this brush on top of it isn't changing it at all. It's a little bit more interesting to have color in it instead of black. So I'm going to stick with a green. So now that we have all the solid shapes filled in, we're going to start working on the pattern. You can see with her face, I left it white and I didn't do any paint marks on it. I like doing it that way because it makes it look like it's the white of the paper. Because if I was painting it, I wouldn't really paint this white. It would just be the paper. So I'm going to do the same thing with the polka dots. So instead of using the oil brush to that, I'm just going to use the hard round, so it'll look like the paper rather than look like p. So I prefer to just draw the white parts on top. You could also erase, but my thought is that since I have her hair and the background underneath, I might have to erase on two layers. So for me, if I can make a shortcut and only have to do something once rather than doing it twice, just makes a little bit more sense to me. Even on the drawing, there wasn't a dot over here. I felt like there's a lot of concentration of them over here and especially red ones and then I didn't have any red ones over here, so I'm going to actually add them in just to balance out the color a little bit. So I have these shapes and here. I think I'm just going to add a layer that is between this orange and this yellow. So I think it would be nice to have another color in there to break it up. Actually, I think it could be a little bit more towards the yellow side. It's getting a little too close to the background. So down, just locked transparency, take that hard round brush and color it. That's a little bit more what I was thinking. I think the background is getting a little bit to contrast it. So I think I'm actually going to change this to be the darker yellow and then makes the lighter yellow inside. Yeah. So great part about working digitally is that you do have the ability to change colors on the fly. When I worked traditionally with p, I always have color studies that I work out for hours to make sure things are perfect for when I go to p. But here, you can mess around and play as you are working on the final. It's so much easier to change things. So a lot of times I'll stay zoomed out really far, so I can see everything that's going on. Right now, I'm just still trying to figure out the background color because it's so not quite working for me. I feel like the shapes in here are really competing with the shapes in her hair and I didn't really feel that in the sketches much, but I'm really feeling it here. What's nice is that you can easily just turn the layers off and see it without it. What I think would be cool to still be able to add some pattern, is that I'm just going to put some flowers in her hair. So I'm not even going to sketch these because I'm very comfortable drawing flowers. But if you decide that you want to make a big change to your project at this point, feel free to do a sketch layer before committing to the paint. When you're working digitally, I don't think that you should be afraid to make changes. The reason and a huge advantage of working digitally overworking traditionally is that you do have those capabilities to change things. So if you can, why not? So now, we have all of our flats down in paint. I definitely had some trials and tribulations while I was working. I had to make some adjustments and I totally encourage you to do the same thing if you need to. Next, we're going to move on to adding the details with a pencil brush.
10. Finalizing and Adding Detail: So now, we're going to work on the final step of our project. I'm going to be using a pencil brush to do all the details, but feel free to use an oil brush if you'd like. So we've been using this menu, the live brushes are actually going to transition over to the pixel brushes. I really like the pencil brush that lives in the sketching tab. I also suggest checking out the other menus in dry media. There are also some brushes that I think could work really well for adding the details. The pencil brush in sketching is just my particular favorite. So to add the detail, I'm going to move a layer all the way up to the top, and color pencils which is what I use when I'm drawing traditionally, they're never really true black. They're close to it but they're not going to be 100 percent black. So I like to move it in this red, black family, and I normally keep my brush around 10. Because I work so much with my hands, I do have some problems with carpal tunnel and that sort of thing. So I try to make my brushes not depend on pressure dynamics as much as possible. So I actually just have the size of 100 percent and also the flow, maybe not quite at 100, maybe at 85. Because then, the brush is going to come out mostly at the same size, and I'm not going to have to press this hard. Now that I have my brushes set the way I want them, to do the face, I'm going to turn this sketch layer back on, and I decrease the opacity of it, and I'm just going to go in and add the details. Because that reference photo I had she was grumpy, instead of making it a straight mouth, I am going to give her a little bit of a grumpy mouth, just as an old to that funny lady. I went back into my brush settings because having the flow at 100 percent actually wasn't working for me that well. So I put it more at 80. I don't really like the curve of these lines, so I'm going go back and give it another go. Another cool thing about these brushes is that I don't really use that much but you can get really nice texture, if that's something that you want to add on to your piece. But if you put your brush at an angle, it'll just do that on its own. But thankfully, you can really easily undo things. Why is it not looking quite right to me? So I'm going to just do some manipulation with the lasso tool, and I can just easily connect the line. Sometimes spline them together out to stick really lightly go over it. I like putting the pencil layer on multiply because you get a nice look of the pencil where you can see the color underneath it a little bit more, and it's also nice because in dark areas like on the green, you can get a darker black there on the darker color. So when I'm working on details, some of them you can see that I've incorporated in the sketch, but sometimes I end up adding details in a place that I think that they might make sense, and then I still end up deleting them. I think maybe I'll try adding some stripes in here into her glasses, because that could be cool. Then sometimes I'll do it and not like it, and just delete it, which is again the cool part of working digitally that it's so easy to do that. But I guess I'm like a more as more a person, and if there's a way for me to add more pattern or color, I'll probably do it. So I'm not really an illustrator that works in tone very often, I'm much more color focused, pattern focused, I don't really like doing shading that much, I don't really like blending, I'm really inspired by folk art and a lot of art that uses flat bright color. I've always really enjoyed folk art. I got a specific interest in it more so in college when I went to a really cool museum in London. It was a toy museum, and they had a bunch of old toys that were handmade, and I got a particular interest in these toys that were made in Russia, and they were all hand-built out of clay, and they had a lot of amazing colors and patterns. Then that started me looking more other Eastern European artwork, and I also saw an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that had a bunch of Pennsylvania Dutch quilts and trunks and things. I found that super interesting and beautiful, and I just really loves the way that people use form and color. I've just find it really interesting and really compelling. So since a lot of my traditional work is a mixture of color pencil and acrylic wash, I feel like this pencil brush does such a good job of looking like actual colored pencil or actual pencil, and I've found that a lot of digital programs, they don't always really look like a pencil, but this one really gives me the true feeling of being a colored pencil. After I started adding detail, I realized that I wanted some more color back in some of these areas. So just going back in with the live brush and adding a few extra touches. So I got rid of that paisley, but now I feel like she's missing a little bit of action. So I'm just going to go in, I'm just going to give adding some stripes a try and see how it goes. The one thing that I'll have to be careful of is this color not running into anywhere where it's red, because the contrast won't quite be there since the colors are so similar. So I'll adjust the stripes, they are not hitting those areas. Since I have so many patterns in this piece, I felt that was becoming a dead zones since there are so much space there. So I just like there needed to be something. So I feel like adding those stripes is definitely helping her pop out a little bit more as well, and it's also just adding some more visual interests. So I think with digital work, it's really tempting to just make edits forever. Being an illustrator, I have a lot of deadlines for clients. So it gets to a point where sometimes I just have to stop because I need to send something off. But it's also important to have that mindset with personal work, because at the end of the day, you can keep changing things forever. But that even doesn't necessarily that you're making them better, it just means that you're changing things. So now that I've added the final details to my work, it's now your turn to add the final details to yours. Just try not to get too intensive about it. Like I said, you can keep adding details forever, but that's not necessarily making it a better piece. Keep experimenting, try some different pencil brushes to see which ones you like the best, and I can't wait to see what you make.
11. Final Thoughts: Thanks so much for taking my class. So I really hope that you enjoyed learning about Adobe Fresco and the live brushes in particular. I really hope that you learned a little bit about interpreting reference and coming up with interesting color palettes. Please share your work in the gallery. I can't wait to see what you've made.
Molly Egan, Artist & Illustrator
