Digital Mixed Media Collage in Adobe Fresco

1. Intro to Digital Mixed Media Collage in Fresco: Hi guys and welcome. My name is Dolores now sprint and I'm coming to you from sunny, Manitoba, Canada. Today I'm bringing you my first ever course on the app called Fresco. I'm using this app on my iPad and I'm absolutely loving it. You're going to be blown away when you see some of the things that you can do with this program. So I've taken a whole bunch of training and the last eight weeks. And I think I'm ready to show you the kind of thing that I call multimedia, collage, art journal piece. I'm going to start by showing you a bunch of examples. So we're gonna go through the work of a bunch of artists that I admire. And then I'm going to show you the step-by-step process that I take in designing a piece like this digitally. So it's quite different than a lot of the work that I've offered. And I'm hoping that you're going to really enjoy this. Make sure if you haven't done so before you hit that follow button up there. And you're going to hear about my courses as they're released them. I'm hoping to bring you a series of courses on this wonderful, amazing Adobe Fresco has honestly changed my life. Now, I can reintroduce a daily art practice, but I felt like I was missing. Are you ready to get started? All right. Let's get into it. 2. Overview, Examples and Inspiration: Hi guys, welcome to Lesson 1. So this is likely the only lesson I'm going to be doing mainly on my desktop. What I wanna do is show you a bunch of the inspiration that I had for this lesson. So I'm going to be showing you a bunch of examples talking about some different artists. And yeah, can you kind of an overview of what it is I want to produce? Let's get started. I'll first show you the artists whose been quite an influence on me in my art journaling. She is early Avineri. And to go through a few of her pieces, I'll show you her book in the, probably the beginning of the next lesson. Her work, I really, really adore. You'll see once you get looking at her stuff, how inspiring it really is. Just take note also the fact that she's got usually tons of collage tie the end. She uses pretty much any art medium. You name it. You'll see it when you go and start looking at her books. And yeah, she combines all the stuff that I'm wanting to combine in this project. So you'll see pentene can watercolor, lots of collage, lots of line art. So definitely check her out. And Tisha more, she wrote the prologue for Earley's book. Incredibly fascinating as well. Again, she ties in all kinds of different media, lots of collage, lots of buildup. You'll notice tons of layers and she does a lot of this really neat stuff to tie in the collage. So take a look at that stuff really closely. I can just imagine her pouring hours into these pages because I've done it. So I totally get it. Like wow, just gorgeous courses coordinates work. Flora boli is another artist who's been a big influence and I'll talk a little bit about her book in the next lesson. Back when she wrote that book and started this whole intuitive art movement. You didn't see a lot of this kind of work. But I think she really ignited a lot of people. And, you know, she does a lot of workshops, has a lot of advice for artists. And you'll see her style a little bit more out there now you see a lot more people doing this kind of work. So definitely check her out. I consider her a big influence to the kind of work that I produce. Another one that I just thought of is Tracy VR to go whipping vertical. Verdugo. Her workers very striking as well and reminds me of floors work. So I'm not sure who came up with this kind of look first, but their work is quite similar. You can definitely see a ton of watercolor in back here. And then the buildup with markers or acrylic paints, all kinds of different techniques. In one of my other classes, I also talked about clear parameter, an artist. That's how it's spelt. You'll see that I've pinned a lot of her work on my art inspirations page on Pinterest. I also love the work of this artist, Mary Lou cardi Marshall, and she combines lots of ink work, line work, watercolor, collage, stamping, tissue paper, and just black and white ink work. I think this is the one that speaks to me the most. This is the kind of luck that I would love to emulate in this new fresco programs. So I'm definitely going to be. Experimenting a lot more than what you see me do today to try to achieve this kinda look. So check her out. There's a lot of stuff about her. She's got a great site that you could visit and she's done a huge variety of work as well. And one of the things I did really like that I read about her is that she really likes to work super spontaneously. She likes instant satisfaction, so she works very quickly. I've seen a little video of her working in really, she has fast and she just kind of let everything happen intuitively. So her work is just breathtaking. Another one to check out is Yelena James. And what I thought was incredibly fascinating about her was that she does use Fresco. So she talks about the use of the fresco program. She describes exactly what her process is. So there's a lot of video kinda stuff that you can watch to do with her. So definitely check her out. I'm going to have a list of all of these artists on the course materials. So make sure you print it out. I've got some links there. If you print out the PDF or the Microsoft Word document or just open it on your computer, you can click the links there live links that you can click into. Artist I love is Anna had a cap Qin. Her work is sold through papaya. Her business is called Papaya ink. So check it out, check out her Flickr site. She's got some really cool mixed media work that I absolutely love. Actually own a really nice handbag with her art on it. I'll also quickly mentioned Sabrina word Harrison. She collaborates with Anna how to count kin, and you can find her work on the papaya website as well. So she's got some interesting stuff. You'll see the look, you'll see the common denomination with all of these artists here is just a particular sort of a look that I really like. And the last one I'm going to mention here is Robyn Mary Smith. You can take a look at her stuff. She's got a lot of really great work that's very similar. Yeah, I'll stop there because I think you get the idea. I would definitely spend a bit of time if I were you kinda trying to decide on the look that you're after kind of thing that you want to do and incorporate into your collages that you do on Fresco. And if that's not enough inspiration for you, definitely check out my boards on Pinterest site alerts, art dealers NASTRAN. The boards, I would recommend our art inspirations. That art journal inspiration paid hand of God. Two or three other art journal categories, intro pages, art journal pages with sewing. And yeah, you can find a lot of inspiration there, especially this art journal inspiration. All right, so I will, yeah, I'll meet you in the next lesson. See you there. 3. My Influences and Motivations: Hi guys, welcome to Lesson 2. In Lesson 2 here I just want to go through a few things on the interface before we get started painting. And I know I mentioned in the first part of the lesson here, I wanted to show you a couple of books that have always been an inspiration to me. I've owned these for a couple of years. One of them is this one. This is the one by Orly Avineri. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. This book has so many absolutely amazing and inspirational words and pictures. A lot of background on orally and her whole kind of experiences that contributed to the kind of work that she does. I talked about how I think I mentioned it in one of my posts that I kinda gone through a period of, I think you'd call it depression, but just kind of being in a funk. And during that period of time, I bought the iPad. So that was a big thing. I really started to produce art again on a daily basis. And it compelled me to go and pick up these two books that I'm talking about from my other studio and the other house and kinda start going through them. And then I also picked up my own art journals to go through a, so I've got a bunch of olds journals filled with all kinds of stuff. I think I've mentioned these and other classes. And I got a few materials that I could work with. And I really found that actually doing the art, physical art, getting me a little bit away from the computer was a really great way for me to just kind of get myself out of that funk, honestly. So this is one of the books that I would really strongly recommend. If not, she has a blog. There's tons of stuff with her online on Pinterest. And just she's got lots and lots of written material about her, so you could probably find it all online. But if not, this book I would strongly recommend is just one of the nicest journal books that I've ever seen. So these are just excerpts from all of her journals, her own personal journals, lots of personal stories. And I just love loved going through this and just seeing some of the technique kind of stuff that she did. And her work here. Peppers and a few of the others that I mentioned definitely inspired me to get back into the groove of producing art every day. So that's when I kind of looked at, started looking at all of the different apps that I had on the iPad. And one of them was procreate and you've seen me do a class on Procreate. I produce a lot of work using that program. A lot of stuff that I have submitted for art licensing. So I tried Procreate. I've been using it. I loved the program. There's just so much that you could do with it. So that's probably been nueve main program. But then I started really looking at Fresco. And I started looking at it because there's a couple of teachers that I do follow and they were using Fresco. And then I did a ton of research on it, watched tons of classes on it. Kyle Webster teaches classes with lots and lots of information about how to use the program. He's got hours of information about using the program. And I started to experiment with it and I actually really, really love it. And there are some things in this program that you just can't do in Procreate or any other program? As far as I know. I've never seen anything like it. So I'm going to take you into a couple of the documents that I have created and you'll see that you can do anything national media. So if you're used to using markers, if you're used to using acrylic paints, watercolors. These are all built right into this program and there's something that just is so much more natural about them then procreate. I can't explain it and I'm definitely not distinct Procreate because I love it and I use it. But this program has something completely different and you're going to see what I mean as I demonstrate this this document is kind of the one that I was using as my titles for this course. Okay, So you've seen this document just a little bit. And you can see here that I've combined all kinds of different techniques. So I've got all kinds of texture in here. Texture brushes. I've got this beautiful watercolor wash thing happening in the background. Let me just hide some of these layers. And you can see that this is very, very natural looking watercolor. So you've got water and paint interacting here in a way that I've never seen in any other digital program. So I'm going to be showing you that. And we're gonna do a project like this from start to finish. So we're going to produce I have no idea yet because I haven't definitely. But we're going to be producing a really great watercolor ink journal art piece is all I can talk. That's the only way it can describe it. I am collecting a bunch of them. I've done a whole bunch here that I will some point post. I really want to do one a day kinda of an artwork. Sites are part of my site. And I guess this is another example of what today's class is all about because this combines my love of collage and my mixing of media that I often do when I'm doing my own work in journals. A lot of the stuff that you see in my journals are combinations of collage you see in the background here. And mixed media. This is actually a painted paper that I did and then incorporated as part of my journal. I often start with pages that aren't complete and then I do my artwork on top. All of the stuff that you see around the edges is collage and acrylic paint combinations kinda waiting to be developed. So this piece is something that I could use an add more to or it is something that I in the past would scan and use as the backdrops for some of my commercial work that I do. Okay, so I'm trying to capture this in the software. So you're gonna see as I go through that project and really work with the same kind of combination of techniques that I use when I'm doing my notes, just basic journal work. Okay. I guess that's in a nutshell, what I'm going to be doing, I'm hoping that this is going to work out. I'm doing the two cameras. I know it's a bit weird. If you're looking at me and you're seeing that camera here in the foreground. Filmy what I'm doing. But I'm, I'm really hoping to kind of start different process where you see me on camera a little bit more. I've been very shy. I am actually one of those people that does not like to have my picture taken. So yeah, hi. Let's get into it. I'll meet you in the next lesson. 4. The Qualities and Merits of Adobe Fresco: Hi guys. Now you see me with my glasses on. So I know in the last lesson I mentioned two books and only showed you one. The other one was this book here by flora boli, brave intuitive painting. And this is another artist who was quite a bit of an influence on me a few years back. I still have the book and I brought it over. I thought that this would be one that you could also take a look at if you're looking at books, I think I caught me both on Amazon and they're not that expensive. You can find a lot of information for this artist as well online. Anyhow, let's get into our little project here. So I'm going to show you first of all what I really love about the watercolor in this program. So I've got just the blank, blank page here because that will show off this color mixing that I want to show you. So there are three different kinds of brushes. There are pixel brushes and the pixel brushes, there's a huge selection, a lot of different categories. And any of your favorite Photoshop brushes you can import into this program. So that's really cool. I've got a few of them here, some of my favorites. And yet there's a bunch of built-in media here. We're going to look at mixer brushes as well at some point. But right now I want to look at these live brushes. So besides the live brushes and the pixel brushes, there are also vector brushes. I'm not sure I'll be covering those in this class, but I do plan to do a lot more classes on this program, so you'll probably see me cover them at some point. Okay. So the live paint brushes, I've got spoil or I've got watercolor. I want to show you the watercolor. I'm going to just choose watercolor wash flats or really big watercolor brush. Now, the controls that are important here are these down here? Of course, we've got the size slider. I'm going to go really big so you can really see this. Then you've got the flow which would be like the opacity, I guess you'd say it's the amount of paint that you would load onto your brush. So, you know, if you're doing watercolor, you can have a really wet brush with very little pigment, or you can have a very pigmented brush and then have less water. So there's almost controls built right into this program, which is what's so cool about it. So the waterflow here is controlled as well. So you can decide how much water you want to actually mix in with your pigment. There are a bunch of other selections here. You can definitely experiment with the angle, the shape, pressure, velocity, all of those settings that you can control and other programs. But I found that the default settings are actually great. So I haven't really messed around with them too much. So let's start by just laying down some. Paint here. Now, not sure if you can see that, but the paint is actually moving right here on my Canvas. So let me try that again. Can you see that, that the water is just dispersing the pigments? So that's exactly how natural watercolor works. Now, this is wet, it remains wet in the software. So if I was to grab, let's see a bright yellow. I could paint that bright yellow. You can see it spreading, but you can also see it as it moves into the other wet area. So that's what's so amazing about this. I mean, it blew my mind. Honestly blew my mind when I saw this. I was like, it's just me. So just like natural watercolor, if you take other colors and you drop them into the wet, let me try something bright. Can you see that that is actually moving? Now? Watch that. Holy cow. That is incredible. So you can imagine, I could, I could have spent an hour the first time I dived into this program, simply playing with that watercolor. And the really neat thing about it is that it remains wet. You can actually export this, take it into Photoshop, do some work in Photoshop, then bring it back into this program and it is still wet. So how they do that? I don't know. If you did want to dry it, you wanted to do some other media over top or you wanted to continue with your watercolor because if it has dried, you can go to the layer settings here. So you click the little icon here that's on the layer. And you can go down here and you can dry the layer. Now, if I was to paint, you can see it's not interacting here. It is still wet, of course, because it's watercolor, but it won't be mixing with that other layer there. So if you grab, let's say a black and you go to a detail brush, and you paint over top of that. Your brush that you're using now is not spreading into the other paint. It's just spreading on its own within that stroke that you just painted. Okay, So once I discovered this, then I realized I could really do watercolor. The way that I was taught. I was taught by a traditional watercolor artist. So I was able to transfer all of the knowledge that I had about watercolor. Really, intuitively, it's not at all like the brushes that simulate water in other programs, this one really works as though it is wet, and that is exactly what makes it so powerful and important. So hi, this black layer here. So here you can see my watercolor just on the white paper. Now, one of the things that I thought was really cool about this as well was that I could go into a regular brush. So let's say an inking brush. And I'm going to just use my favorite, one of my favorites, the oblique pen. And I'm going to just actually creates a new layer here. So I can just hit this Add button and I create a new layer. And I'm going to just do some inking over top of this. This is not a wet medium brush. However, if I do take the wet media brush now and I actually turn down the pigment here, which I can do right here, that makes sure that all I have is water. So you can see that this is a dotted little icon here and down here, this shows us a dotted icon. I can adjust the size. And if I go in, I can wet these other brushes and have the react to the water. Now this is something that I could do with certain markers that I had and this, I don't know, like kids, I can't think of another program that does this. And I just think that this is a revolution in digital painting techniques. And we've never seen this before, so that's what's so exciting about it. So I've ended up talking for over 10 minutes about how me and I haven't started my project. But I'll take a break now. And in the next lesson, of course, what I'm going to do is start that actual project. All right. I'll see you there. 5. Starting the Mixed Media Art Piece: Hi guys, welcome to lesson 4. So in this lesson, I'm going to go through the process of actually creating this mixed media sort of artwork. I'm not sure how far I'll get because I will also be doing a lot of explaining as I go through this. For sure, we'll get the watercolor put in and hopefully some of the ink work. So one of the things I didn't mention in the last lesson was a document size and how that works in relation to your brush sizes. So, you know that I was using a really large brush and it was only covering small sections of my document. So I wanted to show you here that I've got this reduced in size. So my last document was 24 by 16 or sorry. Yeah, 24 by 16. And this one is now 12 by eight. So that means that the brush sizes are going to show up a lot bigger here. Okay? So I'm going to just start by laying down some color and I've selected my wash flat that I was using before. So what about the opacity at a 100 percent? And I've got my flow at a 100 percent and I've got my waterflow at a 100 percent. So let's just start by laying in a little bit of this kind of orange color that I've chosen. So you can see how that spreads out quite nicely. I'm going to reduce my color flow here, so don't nothing but I still have water. And you can see that that also works to spread out my pigment. Okay, so just like the national media, if I had laid down that original bit of color and then I added water around the edges. This other page would kind of flow into those new areas. Okay, so I'm going to also add some yellow here. So I'll bring that back out to a 100 percent. I want to go a little bit more golden need. So I'm going to leave some of that down. So I'm going to go bigger. So you can see how nicely that draws the orange into it. And now I'm going to take out that opacity or reduce that opacity and just add some water. So over here I'm wedding, but I'm not touching that. Oh, I guess I touched a little bit because this is now I'm going to try to flow into that area of water. If I keep adding water, you can see what happens just exactly like it would if it was natural media. So it's pretty cool because it's literally just clear water that I'm putting in there. And that's where you get those beautiful soft fading washes. And I've used this a lot with natural media. And I've been able to do that in my actual painting and with actual media and really good watercolors, you can get this to work. But I've never been able to quite do this in Photoshop or any of the other programs. So this is something really new to me, which is why I'm just exploring this to death because I just love how it works. One of the other things that I thought was super neat about it is, of course there is wet splatter, you know, the, the regular wet spatter that you always expect. Any watercolor brushes or even Kyle has some of these. In Photoshop, and now these are wet. So when you see that I actually go near to those areas, water will pull into them. And remember, this was just wet over here so you can see what happens when I drop a little bit of paint in there. Same with over here. You can see how it's spreading just like you would expect it would on a wet piece of watercolor paper. Now, what was also super fascinating to me was that I could go in and grab Kyle's spatter brush. So go into my regular brushes here, and I've got some of his spatter brushes. I like this beautiful masses is one that I've used if his quite a bit, the course, if I paint this from a wet area, nothing is going to happen. But if I do put it in a wet area, I can actually go back to that. It doesn't even have to be in a wet area honestly, as long as you put it onto the paper, you can then go in and watch as it mixes in or stays just solid. So I can go in here now and reduce that down so that it's just water. And believe it or not, even with those pixel brushes, you can get this sort of thing happening. So let's just enlarge right here and you can see it's wedding that pixel brush and doing the exact same thing as it's doing with the brushes that are built into the program. So I think that is really an awesome addition to what you can do. Now the other thing I wanted to point out is that you can actually go in and drive the layer if you wanted to. So if I wanted to do wet on dry technique though, I would have the watercolor all dried. I could go in with a wet brush and watercolor detail and let's go black, 100 percent flow and I'll go small. You can paint on the wet areas and it's not it isn't spreading. It'll spread within this line, but it doesn't actually spread into that yellow, which is exactly what would happen if you were using it on natural media. Okay, So I'm going to take those two lines off and I'm going to undo try it. I don't know how far back I have to go, but I think it's still wet. Yes. So you can tell it's still wet because I laid down that line and it immediately spread. I'm going to actually use my eraser and just kinda get rid of a little bit of this stuff here. Going to go with a bit of a larger brush and you can actually choose the type of brush that you want. You can go to a lot softer of a brush or you can go with a sponge. Fine, just something that there's kind of a technique with watercolor where you, you dry out your brush and then you can lift color off. So maybe this look of that kind of an effect. So I'm just kinda getting rid of a little bit of it here. This is maybe a bit more. I don't know. I might have been okay without a kid a left it but I'm just going to take some of it away. Kinda wanted to add a little bit of blue at some point too. Okay, So let's just live with that. Now. I want to work with ink now. I'm going to put some black ink over top and I don't know if you remember, the one that I showed you that I've used for the titles was this one. I'm just going to do some loose leaves and things like that to just Add some detail to my, my painting. Now every time you go back into this gallery here, your document will be saved. This is saving into my Cloud documents. So that makes it really easy when I do wanna take this into Photoshop to do any additional work that I might want to do. So I'm gonna go back into this document and make sure that I'm on this layer, which isn't a new layer, and I'm going to do some ink work now. This isn't something that I've planned out. I haven't sketched anything here. I want to treat these documents that I'm originally doing here as exploration, the same way as I would treat my sketchbooks. I don't necessarily drawing my sketchbooks. I just mostly go for it. So I'll do those backgrounds like I showed you. And then I'll get out some markers and I'll do line work over top if I like it, I leave it. If I don't like it, I covered with acrylic paint. So I'm trying to approach this kind of in the same way where I'm doing this work very intuitively. So that's a lot of what's talked about in those books that I was showing you. It's talked about in that Flora bully book, the book breathe intuitive painting. And that's basically what I'm trying to achieve here. Okay? So I'm just going to go forward. Layer, make sure my flow is up. Obviously need a much smaller brush. And what have I got for? I don't want watercolor. I'm going to go into my ink and my favorite is this Blake pen. And I like this black pen because it's got a really natural kind of an edge. So if you look at it up close, you'll see that it's got a very textural edge, so that makes it look more realistic to me. I like it. And the other thing is that you can go really light and then really dark and really change the thickness of your line. And I'm really going to go fast on this. So don't judge, if this is all about doing kinda spontaneous work. Okay? So I'm going to throw in a nice big leaf here, b one over here as well. Notice I didn't pick up my pen at all. Let's add smaller one in here. Kind of orient that went a little bit differently. I'm going to just draw kind of a Verde bronchi thing where even know what you'd call this. And notice how my pen, this pen is very easy to kind of make look natural if that makes sense, because I can do things like change my tilts to make some of the parts look thicker or thinner or I can just press harder to make some parts thicker. So I'm just kinda try to fill in my space and keep the composition really good. So I'm not really putting anything dead center. I'm putting a lot of different sizes in here. Maybe that mirrors that a little bit too much. Whatever, I'll just leave it. And I can also switch to a different color of ink applied light too. So I might hear add another layer and then go with a pure weight. That's another thing. You can actually just click that one little circle up there and get your weight. And I might go in and just paint little bit of white here and there. What can I draw here? I'll just do another one and different flower maybe. And you don't want not sweating the details. I'm not taking a lot of time on each of these things because I really just right now Want to get a feel for the program. So that's why I'm going quite fast with a lot of this stuff. Now, I could go back into my watercolor layer, or I could add another watercolor layer to put some color into the leaves and stuff. But I think the one that I did before, what I did is I ended up going in with some acrylic paint is dead. And I think I'm going to do that to add some additional detail to this image. And then we're going to add some texture and stuff. And I think what I feel I need right now is to some blue in here. So I'm going to go back to that watercolor layer. And let's see if we can just go in and put in some sort of nice blue, not super dark bluer into this section here. So we'll go with a really nice big brush and go back to my wet media brushes are live brushes and go to soft wash. So I'm going to just go in and start adding some. Now it might be something weird here, so I might end up having to go back on that to work with the mix that's happening with that spatter. I know I kinda wanted to get rid of that first, but we'll see we'll see how it works out. So you can see whenever I add a little bit more pigment that I go back into the same spot and it will still spread out because I've got this silhouette right now. Let me go with a little bit of a deeper blue and see what happens as it spreads. So that's kinda nice to you. I mean, it would be so easy to do sky with this honestly. So yeah, I don't love how that worked over there. So what I might do here would be to dry it and get rid of that. Or I'll just go back. I've only done a few strokes and I'll just erase a little bit more of that in the background. I've got that great big eraser still. So let's just get rid of some of this. We can decide later about spatter. I can like that spatters, so I'm going to leave it back to the brush and didn't have that brush. So we'll start with a little bit of a lighter blue first. Some watery here and just get these will go to little bit. And one of the things I really liked about this is that I can make what looks like water dripping. I was able to do that by getting just this kind of a brush, taking most of the color out events, getting a smaller size, and then just kind of pulling down sorry, I've got my race with their oops, too big. Just kinda pulling down. And you can see how the paint is sort of pulling into the wets. And in a case like this where I've got kind of the two colors going on, they can actually pull into each other. I've had that kind of an effect before, which does look quite a lot like water has dripped. So we can't get water drifts by just lifting up the iPad obviously. But you can kinda get the same effect by doing this sort of wet and then adding pigment to it so I can just drag a line here. And if I was to then bring my intensity backup, and I could just use the detail brush. I could drop in a little bit of heat into that water. And you can see that it's going to spread through that, through that wetness there. Okay, So that makes sense. Also when I'm doing something like that, I also go back and I put some spatter there. So I'm gonna do a smaller spatter just to sort of sort of possibly get that looking more like dripping water. So, you know that I'm working that big. I'm not sure if you can see anything there, but so that to me looks a little bit like dripping water. It's not real dripping water, but it's pretty good. So now that I've got this brush, this is that spatter, I'm going to go in and just do some spatter in an around. And that must have been a really wet area there. So I'm going to undo that. Maybe I will add a layer. And then on this extra layer here, Let's go and put in some of the child's bladder. Back to HIO, beautiful miss. And just adding a little bit of that in there. At some point I'm going to import a whole bunch more of his brushes for sure. Going to go back into this one, grab that spatter as well, and maybe go to a darker blue and add a little bit of that in there. Kate. So I think I've got the basis for my next step, which is going to be to add some acrylic and detail and maybe some texturing. And I'm hoping that we'll be able to bring in some of those multimedia elements like collage work to put in the background. All right. Okay, I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Building Up More Detail and lnterest: Hi guys, welcome back. So in less than five here I plan to add some of my collage elements. And then we're gonna do some colorizing of beliefs, add some textures and stuff. Okay, so let's get started. All right, So to add my collage elements, I've saved a couple of things. I've already sort of cut things and got them ready. And I've got them saved here. So I've got several items here to choose from. I'm thinking that I would like some bold text of some sort in here. So I brought that one end. Let's grab another one. And I kinda like this reverse goat text MOOC, kinda small. But whatever for this class this will be more than sufficient. So let's see what else have I got here? So I've got three quick pieces here. They're kind of vintage. I got them off site. That has vintage public domain. I think in the US you call it something different. We call them public domain, Creative Commons or something. But anyways, we've got them here. And what we're gonna do is just do some places. Now I'm going to see what they look like dragged below my watercolor first because my real national media, journal, art kind of stuff. Phase starts with the collage elements being put down first. I didn't do that this time because I was so excited to show you the watercolor, but I think we can still work with it. Okay, so I'm going to move some of these around. So once you're on the layer that you want to move, you can just hit the Move tool. And you'll notice that once you do grab the item that you want to move, you also get these controls on screen. These are great if you want to move things just like a pixel at a time. So really good for real precision moving. I don't need to worry about that too much, but I'm going to try to figure out, and actually I'm going to go back and get that watercolor back in position. Let's see. I've got my snap off. Otherwise this would snap at 90 degrees. I kind of don't like the snap all the time, so I usually have it off. Once you position something, you do have to click done before you can move on to something else. Now why do I keep moving that watercolor? Oh no, I guess it's just an optical illusion. Also drag that layer below because you can see it's working like you would have expected if I had put that down first, the watercolor would then be kind of a wash over top. So I'm going to just kinda move those around a little bit. Now, these items that are placed don't get caught for some reason. Now if you were moving your artwork or resizing your art work, than you would get that warning about the copy. But you don't get it for, you know, just actually placing something off the side of the document. So that's kind of a good thing because that gives you the option of changing. You don't like if you want to move this off and then later on you want the whole thing in there. You haven't cut that little bit off. So I'm going to place that they're temporarily and let's move this one. I don't know what's happening there. That's just kinda screen glitch, I think. Yeah. So sometimes it does that weird thing where it cuts off a bunch of the stuff and you think you've moved a layer, but that's not actually what's happening. So yeah, I'm not quite sure about this one where I'm going to put it. So I think pronounced contemporarily hide it and then I can go back in and think about that a little bit. Now, I also wanted to add a layer to do some acrylic painting on. So I'm going to use the mixer brush is because I think those are really interesting. And something that you would like to take a look at, the mixer brushes are really cool in that. Well, you'll see, I'll show you their mixable, you know, like, like national media. If you have a brush and you dip it in one color and then you mix it with another color, you get kind of intermediate color in between. And that's one of the things that this kind of brush will do. So I think I'm going to get a big chunky mixer and I start by painting just some unusual colors on my leaves. So let's start with an all going to be that color though I've got a new layer, so I'm behind my ink or underneath my ink, but above my watercolor. So here I'm just going to be kind of going to block in some color and I'm not being super precise. I like that kind of casual look that's happening there. Let's maybe do this one as well, not color and switch to make something a little bit redder for these two. I'm going to show you what's cool about those mixer Russia's. So I'm going to end with something a little bit different here. Let's go with something a little bit weirder, kinda yellow. And I'm just going to put that down, kind of an ugly color, but, uh, well, we'll make it work. And then you can see here, let me just hide this. If I go in here, you can see here that my colors are actually mixing. So if I'm dragging or painting into that red area, you see that the color ends up mixing. Okay? If I start with the red, if I get my red on there and I start painting in the opposite direction, you see that the same thing happens. Okay, So that's kind of a neat feature. Let's go a little bit bigger. I'm actually going to switch to a different one. I like this pastel better. I'm going to undo what I've done here so far on that leaf. And let's work with the blue. So that's a little bit too intense. So I'm going to go in and just kinda dull it down a bit. Now, you know it's your own preferences to what kind of brush that you want to use. I have used a lot of pastel in the past, so I know how that would work in natural media. I'm going to go to a slightly Navier and maybe darker blue for this side. And you can see here nicely like regrab that color. And you notice that once I press on the same string in this particular spot, that I can sample the color, which is exactly the same as Procreate. Now the neat thing about the eyedropper here in this program. I'll show you in a second how cool it is. Let's mix. Well, let me do this little leaf here first. But let's say with this one here, this, this particular leaf, I want to really mix a, I don't know, yellow. So I'm going to pick up that yellow. I'm going to go and close here. I'll hide this ink so you can see it better. Make sure I'm on the right layer. I'm gonna go to it an orange. You can see that this will mix. Go back to my yellow. Also do a bit of a darker, sort of a shadow down here at the bottom. I'm going to go a little bit darker with that orange as well. So sample the color and then just go in and pick a slightly darker color. I can see how nicely these colors are all blending together. Now if I wanted to sample some of these colors that have also mixed, I can do that with a mixer brush. So notice when I am dragging over the mixed colors, well, first of all, notice that when I'm dragging over a color, the hue saturation and brightness values are showing up here in this corner. And when I want to sample color that's mixed, I can also do that by clicking on the eyedropper tool. And you notice down here, there's this other sort of icon, and you can see that it's got white, black, and gray. Or when I actually go and try to sample in a certain area with that one, let me click on it first, you're going to see that this in the corner here is actually showing multiple colors, which is super cool. So now if I was to paint, so you see here how it's showing up multiple colors. When I go into my brush and paint with it, it's going to paint in those colors, all three of them. Okay, So you can see that there's a little bit of orange, a little bit of green, and a little bit of the darker shades or tones and the yellow. So that's what's really need a boat mixer brushes and this new eyedropper icon. This is something I've also never seen in another program. Now I'm not going to do a lot of that today because I'm not really covering those brushes today. I'm going to do that in another class, but I just want to show you how cool that is. Let's just show our leaves again. I'm going to leave that one for now and go in and do some additional work on these. So I'm going to add, maybe I'll just use that mixer brush actually mixed in those colors to start out with. And then I'll go into more of the gold and perhaps some nice bright highlights. I'll do that on this one as well. And so I'm getting some really neat, lovely sort of national media stuff working. So at this point I'm just going to probably take some time off camera or I'll do a time-lapse showing you the rest of my process here as I sort of hammer out the final details on this particular artwork. So what I do when I'm doing my natural media stuff in my journals. I think I explained to you that I usually get my collage items in there and then I actually add a little bit of paint. So here you'll see a little bit of paint that I've added on this other layer. I think it was this Lear. So I'm doing that with a couple of Kyle's brushes. This one is called Comics be G1. So I guess that's a background one and it has a really cool kind of some paint on here. I'll leave it on the red for now so you can see it better, but you can see that it's got this cool, sort of almost like crosshatching by its continuous tones. So you can see that there's some lighter areas in there as well. And so I'm going to throw in a bit of that texture. That's what you'll see me doing here at first. And then there's going to be another brush her teeth that I'll switch to. So I'm going to add this one in some areas. And you see I'm painting right over my collaged pieces so that, you know, they're just a little bit more integrated looking. So some of that in here. So it's as if I had glued those down and then I started doing my painting. Which is something you can do when you're doing something digital. You can pretend like you've got them done in advance, even if you haven't. They so there was that brush there and let me just talk a little bit in here. I also want to do some on the leaves, so I'm going to switch to the leaf layer, lock the transparency. And then I can go in and paint simply in the areas that I wanted to. Nothing in the transparent area will actually receive any of the paint. So you can see that's kind of neat because it's giving me a way to add this additional detail without worrying about the background. So I'm going to sample some of that yellow actually maybe go a little bit later. So I can use it for adding some detail here. And I'll sample that blue and maybe use it in here a little bit. For just like the other brushes, you could actually go in and reduce the amount of paint that you're laying down. So in these pixel brushes, I'm going to also switch to race because they are very similar in that they give you just kinda almost like scratches and things. So I'm still on that alpha lock so I could go in and get a lighter yellow yet and even print it over what I did before with the req. And let's go back to this layer. And I'm going to put some rake in different areas here. And I love how you can make these. I call them crop circles Smith. And I'm like, Why didn't really go over them? Now let's bring that other collaged piece back in here. I want to just add a little bit more typographic kind of detail. So I'm going to use this opportunity to show you the blending modes here. You can go into these properties are settings, and go through these until you find something that you think really compliments your design. I'll go through them all real quick here so you can see it's definitely something that is a personal choice here. So you need to experiment with this to really understand what they all do and how you might want to work these in practice. A nice one if I had wanted to do that sort of reversed outlook. But I think for this one, I'm actually going to use Multiply. I can close that off and I'm going to enlarge that a little bit and I'm actually just going to duplicate it. Hit Done. And then you can hit Duplicate here. And I'm going to move this one and crop it. So once this does crop, when I'm bringing into another program for example, then it'll just be this type that's left. Now for some reason it does not crop here, which is really weird because if you were to move one of your other pieces of artwork off and hit Done, it'll tell you that you're cropping it, but for some reason the imported items don't do that. But I I like how this looks and I'm just going to go in now and add a little bit of detail with some spatter brushes. I think I'm going to add them back on that layer. I'm going to add a few and then I'm going to make a new layer. So let me go back to that live spatter. And I'm going to put in some. Darker blue. So I'm going to go in and choose a darker blue. Let's see what my flow is as good and why waterflow now at this point, because I'm putting it into a wet layer, you can see what's happening is it's mixing in with what I've got there, which is cool for some of the effects, you can see how that gives a really cool dark effect that really plays in well with the sort of drips that I was doing before. But I think what I wanna do now is add that other layer and work above it so that I can get spatter that it doesn't dissolve. I've got my biggest setting that I possibly can go with this spatter brush and I'm going to go in and add spatter here and there. Now a neat thing is that if I was to switch to my other colors, let's say yellow, if I added the yellow spatter or whatever color really, it will also mix in and sort of drip into the blue that I've got there so you can see what's happening there. The color is bleeding from one to the other, which can be something that you want and so it's pretty cool, or you can choose to put it on a different layer if you'd like. And I'm going to go to maybe a little bit more of a navy blue, Add darker spatter. Now just like any of the other brushes, the harder I press, the more I get and the later a presses the lighter that those spatter marks will be. So you can definitely overdo the spout or so I'm probably going to stop soon. Because one of the things I want to do is go back to my watercolor layer here and add a little bit more of integrated wash in here. So I'm gonna go to a low flow, high water, less opacity, and go in here and just add a little bit of water. Think I'm actually going to go to weight here so that I can pull some of that yellow over that kind of set it on a white. And you can see that that's kind of helping out what I wanted those sort of drip droopy areas to look like. And I want to pull some of that over. And I really like how that works in there. Just kind of giving that sort of hard edge that you'd get if you dropped your pigment color like that. And then I want to show you another thing that's really neat is if we go into the ink layer and I'll enlarge and show you I've got that same setting going on there that I could go in and actually habit smear my ink, which is really cool because that original brush was not live brush. That was just a regular ink brush. Remember the Blake brush? So I can affect the line as if it was kind of bleeding, which has happened to me before in my journals where I kind of use a marker that wasn't chrominance, so like a water-soluble marker and you can get that sort of thing happening. Sometimes it's a nice addition to what you're doing. So not always a mistake when something like that happens, I'm going to actually undo that. So it's not really a look, I'm after there, something in here. And I have to say, I quite like that. I think this is something that I'll definitely for more in my evening sessions of painting, I think I'd have to go in and dry that layer if I wanted to go in and let's see, do some erasing to clean up and see that I can go in there and just do any sort of repairs that I want here in there, which I hardly ever do when I'm in my journals because I can't really erase. So what I would do if it was in my journal is I would generally go in with an opaque marker of some sort. I'll actually go back to that bleak I think. And then what I would do is a nice small line, sample a color, and then possibly go in and add some darker lines here and there. I've used a lot of this in my journals. If you were to look at my journals really close, you'd see a lot of extra little marker lines and things that I put in to add some interest to my motifs. Something like this. I've got lots and lots of markers and I do use them a lot for this kind of work. I often even just go in on a black line like this and add a second line just to make them more interesting. So I would probably have laid down a thicker black line if that's something that I wanted to do off camera, I may end up doing some work and I'll come back to you in the next lesson and review anything that I've done. All right, I'll see you there. 7. Finalizing and Altering in Photoshop: Hi guys, welcome to lesson 6. So in the beginning of this lesson here I'm going to be showing you kind of a time-lapse of some of the progression through to the end of my artwork. So I want to show you kind of some of the steps that I took. Once I've done that, I'm going to take you into Photoshop. There are a couple of things that I just can't do here in Fresco, so I'm going to do them in Photoshop so I can show you a completely different color scheme that I kind of prefer. Then towards the end of this lesson, I'm going to show you some of those different layouts that I did on some mock-ups, just to give you an idea of how I would use those. And yet just to kind of inspiring you a little bit, the challenge. Hello. Again. So before it completely wrap up this project, I wanted to just show you how these can be adjusted in Photoshop. So there are a couple of things that you cannot do in Fresco yet. I imagine some of this functionality will be added at some point. But one of the things is that you can't adjust hue and saturation in Fresco. Yeah, So there would still be steps I would take to finish up something before getting it ready for art licensing, for example. Or if I was to be trying to sell it on Society 6 or any of the other sites that I sell on. So this was one of those documents that I had done at 24 inches by 16 inches. You can see here by the Layers palette that everything has come in in layers. So I exported it as a PSD document. Now it's hard to see from these thumbnails right now is RGB, so the thumbnails don't show properly. I'll change it to CMYK real quick here so that you can see in the thumbnails here a little bit better of a representation of what the layers look like. Okay, So you can kinda see all the different elements that I had. And I'll just make this a little bit bigger here now, you can see each of the different layers. So if I did want to go in and change the color or experiment with some of these layers. Now this one, for example, is something that I've turned off, but I might choose to use now. I could change the order and all that sort of thing. I've got all this other detail that I could put in. So this is an experimental one that I did last week, one day, and this was experimenting with oil paints instead. So this is something that I'm going to be doing in another class is oil paints. But I wanted to show you that the document comes in just like this. If I wanted to change the hue and saturation here, I could. So I could go shortcut Command U and option to reset it, Option click. And you can see that I could drag this hue slider along and make changes. And this is something that I couldn't do write in the preschool program. So that's one of the reasons I would take a document into Photoshop to change. So I brought in the image that we were working on. Now you'll see that I added a lot of extra texture. So I went in with those rake brushes and a few of the other special effects brushes and just added some extra detail in here. Again, this is something that you could go in and make alterations to. Additionally here in Photoshop, I'm going to show you completely new color, what I prefer it in a color scheme in a second, but I just wanted to show you the breakdown or the layers here. So remember I told you that the collage bits width crop in other programs. Let's just take a look here and see if it is completely crops. Yes, it is. And you'll see that this one too, if I was to pull this in, this one didn't crop. So this one did kind of remain intact. If I did want to move that, for example, I could and the whole thing would be there. So if I was to move it up, the bottom isn't cut-off. That's interesting to note. Again here in Photoshop, I could do alterations with the hue and saturation. Now, one of the box per liter things I did was to add that overlay of texture. I'll turn that off temporarily. But you can see that I could go into this watercolor layer, go to my hue and saturation Command U. And I could go through and make changes to the color scheme. So I went ahead and did that. I changed quite a few of these layers into different colors to come up with what I would consider more of the color scheme that I like to work with. And that's what I came up with. I like these kind of muted colors a little bit more. In the Brown family, I have toned down that red completely. I've changed a lot of these textures. I have eliminated some bits. I've added some here and there. But for the most part, everything that we did in Fresco is still there. The layers are intact so we can go in and make changes on individual layers. And you can see that there was an unlimited amount of layers, their idea at a time of layering, and I could still add layers. So if you go through, you can see all those different things that I added. And when you look at it, if I was to shut off these layers here, that watercolor still looks like watercolor. I think it's gorgeous. I love the way. It's totally blending. I like these blooms are florets that had been formed with the really natural drop of pigments into the color that we had. All in all, I really feel like I captured what I wanted to with this program that to spontaneous kind of quick painting, very intuitive know, pre-planning. So can you imagine if I did actually pre-plan some of this? I had this other layer. I don't think you saw at any point, I don't think I showed you, but this was another leaf layer. So I can easily take this on normal so you can see it and do a completely new art piece here just by moving around some of these other things and changing some of these overlays, like this one. There's a few here, but I could easily, let's just call it a retrofit. I could easily retrofit this background, rotate a few things, and use this line art leaf and have a completely different one here in my series. That's another thing that I tried to do when I'm produced the art is give myself two or three different options that I could develop once I am actually taking this art and taking it one step further to offer that for art licensing, you can definitely learn to work efficiently, quickly and smartly to help yourself out when it comes to producing series are collections of art. So I'm going to show you a few mock-ups that I've done with these artworks just to get you really inspired. And then we will wrap up. All right, hello. 8. Conclusion and Wrap Up: Hey guys, welcome to the wrap-up. So I'm hoping you're going to leave class today feeling really inspired and really motivated to take a look at the fresco program. It's been really fun experimenting with this. So I'm hoping that you will pick up a daily practice as well. The more you work with this program, the more you fall in love with it. I'm going to be bringing you a few more classes on fresco and a few more classes on procreate. Because I'm just loving these new toys. Feels like a toy, but it's really a professional tool. And I'm really looking forward to also producing a whole bunch of artwork for art licensing with these new skills that I'm picking up. And then I'm hoping you're going to pick up as well. Remember if you haven't done so already to hit that ball button. That way you'll hear all about my classes as I publish them. Check out my two Pinterest sites, Dolores art dealers, gastrin, and teach the horse now script. There you're going to find a lot of that reference that we were talking about in class. Check out my profile here to see all of the other classes that I'm teaching. I'm really hoping to have you enroll in some of those. I'd love to see you there. Thanks again for hanging out with me today and I will see you next time. Bye. Now.