Transcripts
1. About This Class: Hi friends, I'm Stephanie Fizer Coleman. I illustrate children's books and make art for products like greeting cards and puzzles. I'm also a Digital Art Instructor. I've been working digitally for over 10 years now. I started working digitally in Photoshop and it's still my true love, but a few years ago I added an iPad Pro to my arsenal and I've found a couple of apps that I work with all the time, both in my professional workflow and when I'm just ready to sit down and make art for fun. More than ever these days, I'm finding myself opening the Adobe Fresco app for those things, whether it's making art for fun or making art for my actual professional career. So what's so awesome about Adobe Fresco, you might be wondering. The really great thing about Adobe Fresco is that there are three kinds of brushes. There are pixel brushes, which are just like your regular Photoshop roster brushes, then you've got vector brushes. With the vector brushes, you can create art in Adobe Fresco and then export it to Adobe Illustrator where you'll be able to fully edit the art that you've created. The really fun brushes are the live brushes, and those brushes are designed to work very much like real watercolors in real oil paints. So if you are a painter, and you've wanted to dabble in digital art and you haven't been able to find an app that really speaks to you yet, Adobe Fresco might be it. Definitely, let's give it a try. In this class, I am going to be teaching you the basics of Adobe Fresco. We're going to start out by customizing the workspace and learning how to create a print ready document. You can be sure that if you're just doing personal work or if you're doing professional work, it is prepared for prints. Once we've done that, we are going to learn about the three kinds of brushes. We're going to start out just learning the basics of the brushes, we are going to learn how to customize those brushes and the different settings that we can play around with, then we're going to do a demonstration painting of each type of brush. By the end of this class, you will have taken one sketch and painted it with the three different kinds of brushes, so you can really understand those brushes, understand what they have to offer, and figure out which ones are going to work best for you and which ones you find most inspiring. If you think this sounds exciting and you're ready to start painting in Adobe Fresco, head on over to the first video and let's get started.
2. App Settings: All right, friends. To get started, I just want to go over some of the interface of Adobe Fresco, so you can make sure that you have a setup that's comfortable and intuitive to you, so you can have a lot of fun when you start drawing in Adobe Fresco. The first thing we want to do is we're just going to take a look at the app settings and if we look up here in the upper right hand corner, you're going to see the gear icon that is always synonymous with settings and we're going to get a little app settings menu. Let's take a look at this real quick. The first thing that we're going to notice is we have the option to switch our toolbar over to the right side of the screen, or the left side of the screen. I like my toolbar on the right hand side of the screen because I am left handed and it keeps me from accidentally changing a brush or a setting or something like that if I smack it with my left hand when I'm drawing. You might like it different. Now on color theme, you can either choose to have a light color theme like this, or if you prefer like I do, you can switch to the dark color theme instead, so either one of those options will work fine. A couple of other settings that you'll see here is you'll have your quick export settings, which lets you determine what file format you want to use for quick export, so that's a personal preference depending on what kind of art you're making and then you'll also see an option here to restore or reset the learn content, which is going to be your content over here, and we'll take a look at that in a little bit. Your next option in app settings is going to be your Apple pencil pressure sensitivity. This makes a huge difference in how your brushes work when you are creating art in this app. You might have your pressure set to very firm, or if you're like me, I have it set all the way over on the light side because I prefer to use a really light pressure. I just find that it's more comfortable for me and it works best for the way that I illustrate. This is something that you can play around with a little bit, especially if you are new to digital art. You can find some settings that are more comfortable for you and this is also something to keep in mind as you watch this class and as you watch other classes and demos on Adobe Fresco or any app, really. The pressure sensitivity setting really affects the way the brushes work. If I'm using a brush and it looks one way and you're trying to use the same brush and it does not look the same, it could just be a matter of having different pressure sensitivity settings, so that's something to take into consideration. Then another setting you have here is what you will get if you double tap your Apple pencil. If you double-tap it while you're in a document, I've got mine set to show color picker, but you can switch to last brush, switch to eraser, zoom to fit, use system settings or have no action. I'm going to go ahead and change it to switch to last brush because that sounds like it's going to be really convenient and then if we go in here, you've got the option to change your touch settings and this is if you want to be able to do things with your finger or if you just want to be able to use the Apple pencil instead. I'm just not going to mess with the settings right now because I don't feel like I need to, but it's something that you can play around if you want to. Your other options here are going to be account, which is going to show your creative cloud accounts, if you have one. About is going to tell you the information about your version of Adobe Fresco and then if we go down to the help menu, we're going to find some really useful learning guides. You can browse art tutorials that are under this learn section right here and they'll just take you through some basics of Adobe Fresco, and then you can see some in-action illustrations that are going to show you all the things that you're working on. You can also go to view gestures and this is going to show you just all of the gestures that are currently available on Adobe Fresco, so that's a nice reference to have. Again, you're going to have your touch shortcut map, which is just like the gesture map. It's going to show you all the different options that you have and then you have your online help and support options. The support option is nice because you can suggest a feature if Adobe Fresco doesn't have something that you really want it to have. The last thing under the app settings menu that we're going to look at is going to be the experimental features and experimental features is exactly what it sounds like. It means that it's basically a feature that is in beta right now. You can toggle this on or off to use features that are listed under here with the understanding that they may or may not be quirky from time to time. I have this turned on and the only experimental feature right now is hold for straight line, which just means it does the thing that Procreate does, where if you hold the end of a stroke, it will snap to a straight line, which is a great feature to have. That is about it for the app settings. Head on over to the next video, and I want to show you how to set up a document.
3. Create a Document: Now that we've got our basic app settings down let's look at how to create a document so we can start drawing. The nice thing is that Fresco has got some document sizes that are already at the top of the screen, these are going to be the most recent things that you have used. You can actually just start here and you can tap on one of these existing options and it will open a document for you. Another thing that you can do is you can just open one of your recent documents here. This is something that you've been working on, you can just open it and get back to it. You can also go to your Cloud documents and you can see anything that you've got on the Adobe Creative Cloud that you can access and work on. Those are a couple of easy ways to get to documents. Now, let's take a look at other ways that we can create a custom size document. You can go here and just tap on Custom Size, and this menu is going to pop up that's going to give you all of the different options and you can pick your own size. You can also select this menu down here on the bottom left that says Create New and it's going to take you to the same place. That means if you choose here Custom Size,or if you choose here Create New it's going to go to the same place. Now, the one difference is that if you click on Custom Size it's going to already have your custom size option over here, and if you use Create New you'll actually need to tap on Custom Size to get this little side menu to open up. One of the nice things about this is it's going to save your recent sizes. If you've recently set up a document it's going to be here, and you also have an option when you are creating a custom size document to save the size. If you do that it's going to show up under your saved options. If you often work in the same size or if you're working on a project that requires you to use the same size for everything then you'll have it here in your Saved documents. Then other options that you have here is under Digital you'll find things that are common digital sizes like HD size, widescreen, standard screen, and then 4K, 8K, and whether illustration. Then the same thing under Print; you're just going to find things that are common print sizes. That's going to be letter, postcard, large postcard, comic book, A4, tabloid poster, A3 and A2. Those are the most common sizes that you're going to run into. Then if you want to you can set up your custom settings over here so you can name your document where ever you want to. If you want to reuse this you will want to give it a title. We'll just call this one fresco sample choose your unit of measurement, whether it's going to be pixels, inches, centimeters, or millimeters. I'm going to go with inches here. Now you've got this little Lock option right here and what it does is you either have the option to change things on their own so let's go ahead and just change this to an 8 by 10. Now if I want to maintain this aspect ratio but I want to change the size I tap on the lock icon. Now if I go in here and change one of these numbers the other one is going to change so that it maintains that aspect ratio and it doesn't ruin things. If I need to resize and make sure that I had the same aspect ratio this is a great way to do that. You also have your options for orientation so you can set your document to portrait or landscape, and then down here you have your pixel size. Anytime that we are working on anything that is going to be going to print,which is what I'm usually doing, because I'm usually working on children's book illustrations, or designs for greeting cards. So I always want to be working at at least 300 DPI. If you are working at less than that and you try to print, it is going to look pixelated and just not great so always 300 DPI at least. Then you have an option down here to have either a white background or a transparent background to work on. I usually use this one white because I just prefer that and if I don't want it to be white I would just add a color in or some texture in the background anyway so transparent isn't a big deal for me. Then you can choose save the size if you want to be able to save the size and come back to it. We would just tap on Create Document and it would open our document in Adobe Fresco. But I wanted to quickly show you one other way that you can open and access document in Adobe Fresco. Down here on the bottom left under the Import and Open option, you'll have the option to choose from either a Photoshop file, or a sketch, or draw a project. You're just going to tap on which one you want. It's going to take you automatically to your Adobe Document Cloud where you might have things saved. Or you can tap back to Locations and you'll have access to your usual location. Your iCloud drive, your iPad, Dropbox, or whatever else you have installed that you use files from so that's another way that you can access your files. Now that we know the basics of creating a document, I want to go ahead and have you head to the next video. We're going to start actually looking in Adobe Fresco and get used to some of the settings in there too.
4. Document Settings: All right friends. So we are in Adobe fresco. Now we've got our document set up. This is an eight by ten inch document. I just want to start by showing you some of the settings that you can access from here to make sure your document is correct. We're going to the gear icon, which always means settings, and this is going to take us to our document settings. First of all, we can name our file here, If we didn't already do it, when we set up our file in our main screen. I'm just calling this one fresco demo. You can also check your size from here. This screen should look familiar because it's the same screen that we use to set up Adobe fresco originally. Now from here, I can go in and change my size. So let's say that I want to change this to a ten by ten square document and you can do that. Another thing I can do is I can change the pixel size. So if I forgot to check this when I set up my document, I can pop in here and make sure that it's at least 300 DPI. Now I'm just going to hit OK. It's going to bring me to a transform screen. I'm going to go ahead and stretch my white background out here. Then I'm just going to tap on done, and now you'll see my document is square instead of eight by ten. That's great. Also from the settings menu, you'll have the option to flip your canvas. You can flip it vertically or horizontally, you can also rotate your canvas and then you can turn on or off rotation snapping, and you can set the degree to which you want your canvas to snap. When you're rotating, you have the other options of having a touch shortcut set up or having an artboard preview, and then if you tap on App settings, this takes you back to the app settings menu that we looked at in the beginning. That's just really awesome if you want to go back in and say you want to change your color theme or you want to move your toolbar to one side or the other. Any settings you want to make, you can make them from here. So that's really handy. Great. That is the document settings menu. Let's hop on over to the next video, and I just want to show you some extra fun things that you can do it in fresco before we dive into talking about layers and brushes, all the fun stuff.
5. Extras: I just wanted to talk about a few extra things that I think are great. One of the first things that you're going notice, is these two tiny arrows in the upper right hand corner. If I just tap on that, it's going to give me a full screen view or what I'm working on. It's going to get rid of all the toolbar, the menu bars and everything like that. This is great. If you just need to get some eyes on your work, you'll still have access to whatever you have active. Whatever brush layer you have active is going to be here and then your layers will still be active. I'm here and then you'll have your eraser option as well. Tap it again when you're done with it and it's going to take you back to all of your regular toolbars and menus. Another great thing, the fresco has that most drawing apps have, but it still handy is you've got the option to tap two fingers on a screen and it'll undo whatever you've done. That super handy. One other thing that I really loved that fresco has, and this is something that procreate does not have, and it has always driven me crazy. I love that up here at the very top of the screen, you have your zoom in percentage. Tap zoom way in on a document working. I can see, oh, I'm zoomed in 364 percent and that is ridiculous and I'm working on things that no one will ever see then this is printed. I like knowing what a 100 percent is and just having that option because I definitely feel like sometimes in procreate, I zoom in really, really far and draw things that maybe I don't need to be worrying about. I just love this percentage. I'm used to it in PhotoShop from all of my years of drawing in Photoshop. For me, this makes me happy and I know a lot of you are going to be really happy about this too. The other thing that I want to talk about before we talk about layers is you can just use the home button here if you want to, and this will just take you back to your home screen if you need a switch between documents or if you want to make a new document and this document is in our recent. We're just popped it back open. The next thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to send you to the next video and we are going to talk about this layers toolbar here.
6. Layers: Friends. Now it's time to dive into some more of the fun stuff so we can really be prepared to start drawing. I want to go over this layers menu. Again, I just want to remind you that I've got my toolbar setup on the right-hand side because I'm left-handed. If you have your toolbar on the left-hand side, your layers menu is going to be on the right-hand side, it's going to be flipped from what my screen looks like. This little button right here under your home button is just going to toggle your layers open and close. If you don't want these to be in the way while you're drawing, you can close them. Tap to open if you need to see what the world is going on here. Your next option down is going to be your layer properties. From here you have the option to name your layer if you want to. This is something that I'm terrible at, so I definitely recommend that you practice being better at it as you work, especially because right now Adobe Fresco doesn't have a good way to organize your layers into groups. If you're working on a document that has a ton of layers, it's probably a good idea to go ahead and name those layers as you work, that way you're not tapping around through layers trying to figure out where you are on an illustration. Your next thing that you're going to have here is you're going to have your blending modes, and if you have ever seen any of my other classes or watched my YouTube videos you know that I love the blending mode. It's a really great way to just get a lot of texture and depth in your illustrations. I really love playing around with those when I'm working. If you're familiar with Photoshop and Procreate, these are pretty much the same blending modes that you have in those options. There's nothing too new here. Then the other thing that you've got in this menu is you've got your opacity slider, which is just going to let you adjust the opacity of the layer that you are working on. We'll get into this a little bit more when we start working on some arts, because I like to use the opacity to adjust the transparency of my sketch before I start drawing on a new layer. The next thing we want to do is move down here where we can see our layers. This part is actually pretty self-explanatory. If you tap on the add button and hold it down, you are going to add a new layer. You have the option to add a new pixel layer or a new vector layer. You don't have to do that, you can actually just tap on add and it will add a layer. Then if you choose to use a vector brush, it will automatically convert this to a vector layer. If you want to take the extra step, it's fine. If you need to move your layers around, all you're going to do is just tap down on it and then you can move your layers around and rearrange them. You can't really tell because there's nothing on these layers right now. Let's go ahead and make a mark. You can see now the mark on that layer, I'm just going to grab it and drag it on top. There we go. I switch my layers around and then I can just do the same thing here. I can switch those layers around. Again, it's pretty self-explanatory, but this little eyeball right here, you're going to use that to toggle a layer on or off. This is really handy if you are drawing something and maybe you try a couple of different things on a couple of different layers and you're not sure what you like, you can toggle that on and off and then you can also toggle your sketch on and off as you're working, which is something that I do a lot. The next thing that we want to look at is going to be the layer actions menu. This menu is going to be accessible by these three little dots here, and we're going to have an entire range of options here. You have your options to add a layer or hide a layer, which we already have right here, so we don't really need those because they're super easy to access here, is also where you go to delete a layer, duplicate layer, copy a layer, cut a layer, and then this is where you're going to create a mask, lock your transparency, which is basically the same as awful lock, lock your layer so you can't do anything else to it. If you choose to lock your layer, you can't make any more art on that layer. If I choose this and I try to draw, it says you cannot draw on a locked layer. Then I can go back in here, unlock my layer and now I'm ready to go. Then the last option that you're going to have is the merge down option, and that is exactly what it sounds like. It merges this layer with the layer beneath it, I'm just going to two finger tap to do that. That's it. Now one thing that we'll go over a little bit later in the class is you'll have an extra option here if you're working with a live brush, if you're working with a watercolor brush, you'll have a dry layer option here, but we'll talk about that later. Let's head on over to the next video and let's dive in to Fresco just a little bit deeper, and then pretty soon it's going to be time to start drawing.
7. Pixel Brush Basics: Alright, now we're going to be over in the toolbar and we're going to be talking about all the fun stuff. All of these are wonderful brushes that make adobe fresco really unique. The first category of brushes that you have are the pixel brushes. These are brushes that are just to your basic photoshop brushes, except that these brushes are really fantastic, even the brushes that just come with adobe fresco are really great. A really cool thing that you can do in here is if you really like a brush, you can star it. If you add a star to it, it's going to add it to your favorites so you'll have easy access to your favorites, which is fantastic. Then you'll see here these are divided by categories so you'll have some idea what you're getting. Then down here are brushes that I have imported, which is awesome. If you want to import brushes, you hit your little plus mark down here. You go to import from files and it's going to take you to your cloud documents or your Dropbox or iCloud or whatever, where you can import your brushes that you have saved from photoshops. You do have to save those from photoshop. You can also tap on get more brushes and that is going to take you to the Adobe website where you can download all of Kyle Webster's brush packs, including the seasonal updates that he does, and there's some really awesome brushes there, so definitely don't miss out on that. Alright. Let's just take a really quick tour of some of the existing brushes. Because like I said, these are actually pretty great. You've got a lot of really great texture in these brushes. Again, if you follow my work, you know that is my jam. I love some great texture. So these pastel brushes are favorites of mine. They're really wonderful. There are some effects brushes that you might find to be useful in creating like foliage and things like that. I don't want to go through all the brushes because it's a lot. I just want to go through some of my favorites real quick. Then under painting, you've got some brushes that have got some really awesome detail. You've got your go-go brush, which is similar to the Gouache a Go Go Brush in photoshop, which I'm a really big fan of. If you like Gouache, this is going to give you that really nice layered situation. Then let's look at scratchy bristles. This is another one of my favorite brushes. You see, it's just got some really nice, not just variation and texture, but it's also got really nice variation and colors, so that's going to be really fun to use to build up a lot of texture and color. Let's just undo our marks on our canvas with that two finger tap that we love so much. Now let's take a look at some of the settings. I'm actually just going to go back in here. I'm going to go dry media and choose hard pastel, which is one of my current favorite brushes. I use it all the time. We want to go down here to this menu, which we can actually, if you grab this, you can drag it around wherever you want to. If you want to have this elsewhere on your canvas so it's easy to access, you can, or when this turns blue, it locks back in there. This is going to be your color wheel right here. This is going to be where you are going to select your color that you're working with. I'll talk about this a little bit more, a little bit later in another video, but I just want to show you where it is. We're just going to stick with black for now. Now you'll have different options for your brushes depending on if you're using pixel brushes, live brushes, or vector brushes. We'll talk about this for each one of these. The first thing that you have here is you have your size option. You're just using a slider to make your brush bigger or smaller. The nice thing is it shows you what the brush looks like so you can get an idea. Then from here, we have got the flow option, which is basically, I always just like to think of this like if you are painting, this is going to be how much paint is on your brush. If we move this up, that means that it's going to be super dark. Let's unhide my layer. There we go. See how dark and full that is. Now if I take the flow way down to like 30 percent, you can see you get a lot more texture and it's a lot less solid. That's something fun that you can play around with. Now, another option that you have here is smoothing. This is very similar to like the streamline feature that you would see in procreate. I've got to turn all the way down now. Let's make our brush a little bit smaller so maybe we can see our line here. You'll see here it's got some natural variation in it. Now, if I take the smoothing up, you'll see that it loses a lot of that natural variation and it's making the line a lot more perfect as I draw. This is something that's really great if maybe you're working on some lettering or maybe some technical drawing or something like that. I'm a person who likes a lot of texture and a lot of juxtaposition of clean edges and rough edges. I tend to keep the streamline option turned way down. This is also something that can help you if you are new to digital art and you're finding that your lines aren't quite as nice as you would like them to be. Play around with this smoothing option and see if you can get a little bit of help there. The very last option that we have here is going to be our brush settings. This is going to show us an example of our brush here, we can change the blending mode, which again is the same thing that we have on our layers, but this is going to activate it on the brush. If I change this brush to multiply, that just means that, my guess you can't really see on black. Let's pick a light gray. If you change it to multiply that just means basically you can layer the color see here how it's just layering on top of each other and instead of just being solid like it was. You can play around with those different blend modes. Then your other option that you have is shape dynamics. You can adjust your size jitter up and down if you want to. You can select how you want the shape dynamics to be controlled. Do you want to do the pen pressure, pen tilt, fade, or none? Again, you can change the minimum diameter on this. You can also choose the angle jitter, which is going to rotate the brush shapes so you have a way more textured edge than you originally had. Then you have flip x and flip y, which does exactly what you think it does. Then same thing here, we've got scattering, so we can turn this on and make it scatter further away. If you've got a brush and you're just not happy with how it's working or you wish that something else would happen when you use it, it's fun to come in and test out the brush settings and see if you can get things to work the way you want them to. Again, transfer is going to be something that is going to affect the texture of your brush that you're using. A lot of this stuff, and I recommend less than my other photoshop classes to. A lot of it is just like play around with it, see what works best for you, just give it a little bit of time, and just give yourself some space to be creative with it. The last thing that you want to do is you've got this option right here, which is going to reset your brush. That means that all the changes that you made when you talk this option, it's going to take it all the way back to the original settings, which you can see here. Now again, it's working like our original brush. You don't have to worry if you're going in here, you're messing around with the settings. You don't have to be concerned that you're going to mess the brush up and it's never going to work the same way again. That's why I'm saying it's really fun to get in here and play with it, and just see what effects you can come up with and how you can create a brush that is unique for your own work. Alright. So head over to the next video and we're going to jump down to the next item on our toolbar, which is going to be live brushes.
8. Live Brush Basics: All right friends. Our next video that we are going to be looking at, is going to be the live brushes. I'm just going to go ahead and undo all of my brush sloppiness here. Then let's just go in and erase this brush stroke as well. So our live brushes have got two options as of this recording. So you've got watercolor brushes, you've got four brushes there and then you've got oil brushes and you've got, it looks like about seven brushes there to choose from. So the cool thing about live brushes is that they're actually designed to behave like real paints. So that means in the case of oil brushes, they are going to behave like you're actually painting with a brush, which means that your paint is going to be heavier when you first start painting and then it's going to fall off as you continue painting, just like you, were reducing the amount of paint on your brush. With watercolors the paint is going to flow like it is wet on wet, or you can change it so you're using wet on dry. You've got a ton of options. So this is probably of all of the Apps that I've tried. These are the brushes that behave most like real paints. So these are going to be really fun for you to play around with. So let's take a look at the watercolor brushes. So I am just going to start with the watercolor wet spot or brush because I think it's really fun. So these work the same way, so you can use the star icon to add it to your favorites. So then you'll have all of your favorite brushes here under the favorites menu. The favorites menu is unique to whatever type of brush you're using. So you won't just have all of your brushes in this favorites menu like this favorites menu is for live brushes. The favorites menu up here is going to be for just my pixel brushes and then the favorites menu down here would only be for vector brushes. Again, we've got our watercolor wet spot or brush that we're just using it to take a look out here and I'm just going to make it big. Then we'll just do a little scribble in here and I'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see what's happening. Because as I go in with, say, a darker color, you'll see that it is really blending in with the existing paint and it's expanding very much the way that watercolor does in real life, which is awesome. So you remember that I mentioned something about the layers in a previous video. So if we go to our three dots, here's our new option. So this is dry layer. So if I stop on dry layer and now I go in and start adding color, you can see that it behaves a little bit differently because instead of acting like wet on wet, it's acting like wet on dry. So it is activating that paint underneath there. Now I can also just make a new layer if I want to and then this paint is going to behave on its own. It's not going to have any interaction with the paint that is beneath it. So the cool thing about this is that you've got the freedom of water color and you've got the undo option if you want to and then you've also got the option to add layers, so you can really control how your paint is going to behave. Now another cool thing is that unless you do this dry layer, your paint is going to remain wet. So if you have to stop working on a drawing and come back to it like three hours later. This is still going to behave like wet paint unless you have selected this dry paint, the dry layer option. So I think that that's pretty awesome. So the settings are very similar to the settings for our pixel brushes. So we've got our size setting right here, which again you slide up and down. This time you've got your flow setting and this is going to work a little bit different. So I'm going to go ahead and just turn the flow way down here and then let's go over here and make some marks. You can see here that this is just almost as if you're painting with a brush that just has very little paint on it and a whole lot of water and then I can turn my flow backup and you'll see now that it's giving me that nice dark bold color. Your next option that you're going to have here is going to be water-flow and this is basically like you. I like to think of it as the amount of water that I would have on a brush. So if I take the water flow all the way up, that means that I'm going to have nice wet brush and I'm going to get a lot of nice wet, paint flow and then if I take it all the way down, then that means that I've got a dryer brush and you'll see here the paint is not melding together the way this paint is. So this is an option that you can play with to get the effects that you're used to getting with watercolor. If you are a water-colorist, this is not going to be a perfect approximation of water color, but it's honestly pretty darn close for a digital App. It's pretty amazing. So the last thing that we're going to have here again is brushed settings, and this works the exact same way. You can go in and change your angles, you can adjust your shape dynamics if you want to. You can adjust your pressure dynamics, and you can adjust your velocity dynamics, which is going to affect the size and the flow of your spatters. So there are a lot of fun adjustments that you can make here and then again, tap this button and it's going to reset your brush and everything is going to be all happy and back to normal. So I hope that you're going to have a lot of fun playing with these live brushes once we start working on our trio of painting demos. Now head on over to the next video and the last brush that we're going to talk about is going to be these vector brushes.
9. Vector Brush Basics: Hi friends. We're on our last of the trio of brush options, and these are going to be your vector brushes. Let me just undo my watercolor spatter on here, and then we're going to go to our vector brush selections. Now, you've just got about five brushes on here, and let's just go through them real quick since there are so few of them, and let's just go ahead and just make really big scribbles. This is going to be your basic round brush, then you've got your basic taber brush, your basic flat, basic chisel, and your basic terminal. There we go. That's a little bit nicer. Those are just the five brush options that you have got in Adobe fresco, and these are just the vector brush options. Again, when you've got a brush selected, you can use the start to set it your favorites. When we go down and look at the options here, you're going to find a lot of the same options. You've got your slider that's going to allow you to adjust your size, you've got your smoothing option. Now for vector art, I think that you're going to find that you're going to use the smoothing option a whole lot more than you would when you were just doing roster art instead. I definitely feel like it's something that I use more often when I do vector arts. Then again, you've got fewer settings in your brush settings right here, and again, you can just reset it if you want to and it's going to take it back to the default size and everything. The really cool thing about vector brushes is that if you are a person who likes to work in Illustrator, you can create an image in Adobe fresco using vector brushes. You can export this as a PDF, and then you can open it in Illustrators so you can do any final edits, or prepare it for print, or prepare it to send to a client, or whatever. It's really great for you that you can work from Adobe fresco. Now, you won't have the options to work with the pen tool or anything like that. Basically you're just going to be free hand drawing with these vector brushes, and then you can use them in Illustrator if you need to edit them or add anything to them or whatever. Head over to the next video, and I just want to finish chatting about the toolbar here, and then we're going to be ready to start painting using all three brushes, which I'm so excited about.
10. Other Tools: All right, so let's take a look at the last options that we have listed here. We've got an eraser option. So first of all, let's draw something. [laughs] We've got our eraser which we can use to erase things. Another cool thing about the Adobe Fresco is that I've got a textured brush selected here, and I've got this little fellow right here. So this little guy right here changes depending on what the tool that you're using is, but if you tap down on this, A; you can move it around, so you can drag this wherever you want it on the screen. When I've got a brush active, if I hold down on this, it is going to let me erase with the brush that I have selected. So it's going to let me erase with the same texture that I have selected instead of this option which is just going to give me a hard edged eraser. So depending on which thing you want to happen, you can either use the Erase tool or you can hold your finger down on this while you've got a brush active, and it'll erase with all of your texture. So your next option down is going to be your Transform/Move tool. When you tap on that, it's going to bring you into this menu, so you can grab whatever is on this layer and move it around. You've got your options to flip vertical and horizontal, and then you can grab these nodes. You can make it bigger and smaller or you can grab this end point here, you can rotate it if you want to, and then up here you've got your options to undo and redo if you want to, or you can just do your two-finger tap. Once you've got everything moved and resized how you want it, you can just hit "Done." This warning is popping up because it's letting me know that part of my art is going to be cropped off the canvas. So I'm going to say that that's okay and then I'm just going to go back here. All right, so our next option is going to be our lasso and marquee selection tools. So right here, we hold down on this one, just like regular Photoshop and Illustrator. Anytime there's a tiny little triangle there, if you hold it down, you get some more options. So we have got our Lasso Selection tool here which is just going to let you do free-hand Lasso Selections, and this is going to pop up a new menu here. So you can be taken to the Transform Menu. If you've last said something that you would like to move, you can erase, you can mask, you can deselect an area, or you have options here that are just going to say like, "Okay, I'm going to have the marching ants around my selection or I'm going to have the selection overlay." So whichever one of these options works best for you. When you're done with it, you hit "Deselect" and that's it. We've also got our square fill here so we can just make a square, color in the brush if we want to. We can use the paint bucket to drop an entire color in there. We can erase the entire selection if we want to, and then you can do the same thing with your circle selection. You just add a circle to this. Again, I can use my brushes in here. You can stack this selection. So you can make a square, and then pick a different selection option, and you can add some freehand stuff to it. So if you've got some really complex shapes, this might be a good way to do that. I can erase the entire thing if I want to, or it can also transform it. I can use my two-finger tap to go back. So you'll see here now, I've got the option to transform everything that was on that layer that I made with my selections. We'll deselect that. All right. Now in this case you'll see that when I hold down on this button, it's going to constrain our proportions. So that means that if I want a perfect circle, I hold down on this little option, and if I don't want a perfect circle, I can let go of it. Now I can make an oval, an ellipse or whatever I feel like making. So let's go ahead and deselect that. The next option down is going to be the paint bucket and it is exactly what it sounds like. It's going to have you fill in that area that you tap on in the screen with a flat colors. So this is going to be something that we're going to use when we are working on our illustrations. We are going to be using the vector brushes and the paint bucket tools. So here again, you can pick a full-on like this pixel or vector. That's great. Our next option down is going to be the eyedropper tool. If you're familiar with digital art at all, you know that this is just going to be our color picker. So if we're picking colors from a canvas or if we're picking colors from a photo, or some sort of color palette reference or something like this, that's what we're going to be doing here. Next down, we are going to have the photo option, which is going to allow us to import photos or files from our camera, Dropbox, iCloud, Creative Cloud, or wherever we want to get photos from. This is really great if you are importing a reference photo or if you've got a pencil sketch that you've taken a picture of that you want to import. This is the fun option. Now the last option here is, you've got your color wheel. You can collapse the color wheel if you want to, you can also collapse or open the hue saturation brightness sliders, which is what I use. You can also change this over to the RGB sliders if you are more comfortable with that. You'll then see your recent color selections for your document right here, which you won't see right here because all I have done is just this. You will then find some Adobe Fresco color palettes that come with the app if you are inspired to give those a try. I think that we know all the basics of the interface now, the basics of the brushes, and we're ready to start diving. Starting in the next video, we're going to take one illustration and we're going to paint it three different ways using each of the three different brush types. So head on over and let's get started on the fun stuff.
11. Sketch & Color Palette: All right friends. Let's go ahead and just get a basic sketch setup, and then we're going to work through coloring this sketch in three different ways using vector brushes, live brushes, and pixel brushes. As always, when I'm learning a new skill, I like to use something that is really simple in shape. I'm not going to be trying to illustrate a masterpiece here. I am just going to be doing some really simple mushrooms because again, simple shapes, simple layouts, and that's really going to allow us to play around with brushes and do a lot of experimenting and seeing what we feel comfortable with, and then once we get past that, then of course, we can dive in and do some more complicated work. But for this class we're just going to be doing a really simple mushroom illustration. I'm just going to pick something really simple that I can sketch with and I'm just going to pick a gray color, and we all know I like a little bit of texture. I'm going with the rough pencil to sketch with, and I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller. I've got a square canvas here, but I'm actually going to do a little bit of a rectangular shape and then I'm going to have some mushrooms that are going to fill this shape and then be popping out of it too, because I think that'll be a really fun little details. Let's just start blocking in just some rough shapes, and if you are a follower of my work at all, you know that I'm a pretty rough sculpture, pretty lazy sloppy sketcher. I always feel like because I work digitally. That if my sketches are to clean my work is just boring. I follow my sketch too closely. I like to just sketch a little bit more roughly. I know that I can have a little bit more fun with that when I color. It's a little bit less pressure that way. Directors on it [inaudible]. I've got my rough sketch blocked in here. You see, I've just got a couple little groups of mushrooms. This little squiggly area's going to be some moss, and then we'll have some nice dark contrasting background. The other thing that I wanted to do before we get started, is I want to go ahead and just settle on a color palette because I do want to be using the same color palette for all three of our illustrations. I feel like using a cohesive color palette across all three examples is really going to help you see the different ways that the brushes can be used, the different effects that you're going to get. It's just going to make it look a little bit more cohesive to your eye. I am going to just make some scribbles on this page, just for my own sanity. This is a habit that I picked up a really long time ago in Photoshop or just like just scribble a little color palette on my document or on another document and so I can quickly access it. You can also add to your color palette here. I am actually going to choose some blues. Maybe do a dark blue. I think I'm going to do some blues and greens, and then I think maybe we'll have a pop of some orange or some coral or something like that. Maybe like un-muted green like that. Maybe a darker green. Maybe I'll just add that darker green too so I have five colors to work with. Then I really want to have a pop of a warm color. Let's try this orange color here. That might be a little bright on the orange. We might want to just tone that down just a little bit, not too much. Let's go back. Let's stick with the bright orange and we'll tone it down as we work. Here we go. We've got our rough sketch set up and then we've got our rough color palette setup also. I'm just go ahead and prepare for working on my sketch layer, I'm just go ahead and change it to multiply and then I'm going to move the opacity down to say about 25 percent and then let's go ahead and make a new layer. We'll drag this down below and this is going to be the layer that we're going to be working on. We'll be able to see our sketch through here. One last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use the paint bucket here. Yes, and I'm just going to add myself a white background here, so this way I can see my sketch a little better. Great, so head on over to the next video and we're going to do our first color on this. We're going to start working with vector brushes and the paint buckets.
12. Vector Painting Demo: All right. Friends, so we are ready to get started on our illustration here. We are going to be working with our vector brushes, and then we're also going to be using the paint bucket to fill in. I'm just going to start out with our basic round brush. I'm going to make this a little bit bigger, and then I'm just going to start with a dark blue color, I'm going to use that as a backgrounds. Let's just start filling in a background color. Now, you might remember that when we set up, I checked the experimental option to have a straight line that clicked whenever I held down, so that's what's happening here. I'm holding down my brush and the straight line is clicking into place. Now, I've got myself a nice little square shapes so I can pop over to my paint bucket and I can fill that with a black color. One thing that I want to do is I'm just going to go back to my brush here, I'm going to get a little bit smaller, and then let's zoom in and fix this wonky little corner we've got here. In our squares, I'm going to be perfect. It's going to look a little bit wonky on the edges, but I think that that's what gives it more of a charming look and less of a cold and digital look. We're just going to do the same thing down here, I'm just going to fix this little edge. Then the same thing over here, just make this one even. The cool thing about working with these vector brushes and Adobe Fresco is that you can export this. You can export this as a PDF, you can open it in Adobe Illustrator and you can edit everything from there. That's something that's really amazing to have. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to speed up the video a little bit, and I'm basically just going to continue using the vector brush and the paint bucket just to fill in all of my flat colors. Then I'm going to pop back on here, and we're going to talk about adding some details, and we'll also talk about the possibility of adding some textures with some of the pixel brushes and live brushes. This can be making new layers as I go, so I can keep my background separate from the rest of my illustration. All right. Friends, so you can see here that we have flocked in our flat colors. Again, we just used the vector brushes. I used the basic round brush to start and then I switch to the basic taper brush to do these little blades of grass, they have the nice little pointed ends. Then we also use the paint bucket tool just to fill in everything here. We've got a couple of options at this point. Let me go turn our sketch layer back on so you see what we've got left is just to add a few little details to this. I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and continue using the vector brushes at this point, and I'm just going to add ended dots on the mushrooms, and then we've got some little stripes here. Then maybe we'll add in a few little details in the background. Now, if you want to, you can actually switch over to using live brushes and also the pixel brushes at this point. You can layer different brushes on top of one another, which is one of the fun things about this particular app. Now, the reason that you may not want to do that is because if you start layering raster pixel effects on top of this, it's not going to be scalable when you export it to illustrator. If your intention is to do this in Fresco, and then export it to Illustrator and do some further editing from there, then you want to be really mindful when it comes to using the live brushes and the pixel brushes in this app, because those are not going to be scalable, or as you can probably edit them, you probably import them and vectorize them. But they're not going to be able to be edited in the same way. So I would say that if you are a vector artist, you want to stick with using the vector brushes on here and then just export as a PDF and maybe do your final textures or anything that you'd like to add in Illustrator, so you can make sure that it scaled to the correct size if that's something that you need to do. I am going to make a new layer. Let's take another look at our sketch here. Yeah, I'm just going to go in here, and just add a few little details. Actually, I think I'm just going to add the details in white, so let's just go ahead and pick white. Then we're going to go back to our basic round brush and make it a little bit smaller this time, because I'm just going to be using it for these details, so I don't really need a whole lot of anything. Then I'm just going to make another layer just so I've got my little details that are on their own layer. I'm going to start with this little blue mushroom here, and I'm just going to go in and just add some little liner details and then we'll add some little like dot details. When I first started illustrating digitally years ago, I had a not very good Wacom tablet, and I found that my line work was really shaky. I had a really hard time drawing on it. Even though I liked Photoshop and I knew that I wanted to have a lot of texture in my work, I would almost always start my work in Illustrator. I would sketch and then I would make a vector flat of my illustration. Then I would send that over to Photoshop, and I would add my textures and all my little final details there. I did that until I was able to have a strong enough hand to draw digitally and not have to worry about shaky lines and wonky shapes. If you're feeling like you are at that point right now in digital arts, then this is going to be a really great starting point for you, because if you're using the vector brushes, and we talked about this earlier. If you're using the vector brushes, you have the option to smooth. You can adjust this up or down to make sure that you're getting nice, smooth, even lines, if that's what you're going for. This might be a good thing for you to play around with. Like I said, if you're new to digital illustration, you might start by doing your flat colors with vector brushes and then you might go back in and do your details with a roster brush or pixel brush or a live brush. Or you might do your flats in Adobe Fresco, and then you might send this over to Photoshop or even Procreate if you'd like brushes over there. Or you can even stick in Fresco and keep out in your textures here. I always feel like, especially if you're new to digital art or if you're just looking for some inspiration. I think it's always good to play around with some different apps and see what works best for you, what brushes speak to you, and what works really well with your style. Let's go ahead and turn our sketch layer off. All right. For this one, let's just go ahead, and use our blue. Just vary it a little bit, and I'm just going to continue on with the stripes. See that's fun. I love a little bit of color variation like this. All right. Then I think the last little detail we're going to do is going to be done here on this little green bit, and we're going to do the same thing. We're going to pop this lighter green out. Now for this one, I'm actually going to work on the same layer so I can make sure that my blades of grass are affected by what I'm drawing now. This gives us sort of like a nice little almost negative space look since we're using the same color as we're using for the mossy background. All right. Let's just go turn off our color palette layer. Now, you'll see that we've got our first completed illustration finished. This is done completely with vector brushes. If we want to, we can export those to Adobe Illustrator and we'll be able to edit everything, and we'll be able to infinitely scale it if we need to. I head on over to the next video and we're going to be talking about live brushes next. We're going to be working with a lot of the fun watercolor brushes, and seeing what sort of different effects we can get with that.
13. Live Painting Demo: In this video, we are going to be taking the same sketch and we are going to paint it using the Adobe Fresco live watercolor brushes. Now, if you remember from before, you actually have two options for brushes. In the live section, you have watercolor brushes, and then you have oil brushes. If oil is more your gem, I would definitely suggest playing with those instead. But watercolor textures are a little bit more in my wheelhouse even though I'm not a watercolor painter. I'm a digital artist. That's just what I am more comfortable with and more excited to play around with so we're sticking with watercolor here. Now, you'll notice that in this document, I've moved the last piece that we did up here into the upper left-hand corner. What I did is I just duplicated my document in the home screen, and then I merged all of my vector layers, and then I just adjusted the size. I just want it up here for reference because as I said, I really want to use the same colors on all three of these illustrations that I'm going to be working on, so this is just going to give me a really nice quick reference up here. I'm going to go ahead and just select this as my background color. I've already got watercolor wet spatter set as my brush. I'm just going to play with the size a little bit because I want to start blocking in this little background square here. Let's just see what happens when we do this. This is just going to give us a really nice uneven edge with a lot of splatters on it. I don't want to make my brush too big here because if I make it too big, I'm going to completely lose my rectangular shape and just end up with a big blob. You definitely don't want that. I'm just scribbling in some color here, and that's how we're going to use a couple of different brushes. We're going to use this watercolor wet spatter, and then we're just going to use the watercolor wet detail. Now, while I'm already in here, I'm just going to go ahead and add in a little bit of color variation. If you remember from before, we're actually working in wet right now so this is basically wet paint going into paint that has not dried yet. Let's just tap our layer and let's derive the layer and then go in with a darker color, and just add a little bit more variation back here. This is going to be obviously completely different than the vector piece that we did. This is just going to have a whole lot of texture, and a whole lot of layering. It's going to be a whole different experience here. I think that that looks fun. I actually want to go ahead and let's just soften these edges just a little bit. If you remember, when I hold down on this tab up here, tab button, I'm not really sure what it's called. Let's call it a button. When I hold down on this button up here when I'm using these watercolor brushes, it actually behaves as if this is just a brush that is full of water. In this case, it's just allowing me to go in and soften and extend these edges a little bit, so they don't look quite so harsh. I think that that's pretty fun. Now, I'm just going to select my green color, and let's make a new layer for the green color. Now here is where I really want to start experimenting a lot with using some different tools. In this case, I am selecting the lasso selection tool, and I'm just going to go ahead and select the area for my sketch that has little bit of mossy green in it. Now you may not be able to see it super well because the sketch is really light, but you can see now that I've selected it that that's the shape that I'm going for. I've still got my watercolor spatter brush selected. I'm just going to make it a little bit smaller. I'm just going to go in here and start filling in my green now. Now you see because I've selected this area with the lasso tool, it's just coloring in this edge. I'm getting a really nice sharp edge, and then I can come back down here to the bottom. I don't have this area right here selected, so I can do a little bit more free coloring on that, just like I've done with the blue. Then in a second, we'll just use our little water brush to even out the colors. I think on this, I'm just going to let some of the blue peak through. This is the fun thing about working with Adobe Fresco like this is you don't have to be a 100 percent literal with how the paint would work. I wouldn't put a dark blue down and then try to paint a green over top of it. If I was working in watercolor, I would have to plan a little bit better. If you're a person like me, and you're maybe not super great at planning ahead when you're working on your illustrations and actual paint makes you a little bit nervous, I think that you might find that Adobe Fresco is a really fun way to play around a little bit. Again, I'm just going to hold down on this just so I can get this little watered effect on the edge, and it's just going to run it in over this blue. Super. We're going to go ahead and make a new layer now. Like we talked about before, the reason that I'm making new layers is because this behaves a little bit more like paint than your average digital brushes going to. If I start painting my mushrooms on top of one of these existing layers, in one of these existing layers, the paint is going to act a whole lot different than if I make a new layer for it to work from. Let's go ahead and let's do our little mushrooms first again. I'm just zooming in there so I can select my color. Now we're going to switch over to our watercolor round detail brush. Let's see how big that is. I think that's fine, and I'm just going to go ahead and just paint in my mushrooms. Now you'll notice up here where I've got my percentage up that I'm zoomed in pretty far. The edges of this are going to look pretty pixelated, especially if you're watching this full screen. It's going to look pretty pixelated, but it actually not. Let's deselect. You'll see we've got this really pretty watercolor effect here. Then next, let's go ahead and let's do our last mushrooms will turn our sketch layer back on. This time let's just stick with our watercolor wash soft. We're going to make a smaller brush and we're going to start washing this color over. Again, this isn't something that you're going to do with regular watercolors. Don't think you're going to paint a dark blue background and then start washing orange over top of it. It's probably not going to look pleasant. Then I'm going to switch back over to my wet spider brush. Let's dry this layer. Let's pick a lighter color. Make our brush a little bit bigger. Here we go. Then we're going to start adding some spatter details here. Same thing as this mushroom. This is just going to give us more interest, a little bit more texture, make it look a little rougher. I'm going to do the same thing with these little guys. Maybe, I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller on that one. Too small. Again, you see this is what I really love about digital art is it's super easy to adjust my brushes if it's the wrong size to undo finding too and to do experiments. There are a lot of ways that I probably could not experiment if I was working with traditional media. Sketch layer back on. Then we're just going to go in here and finish these little details. For the rest of these little details, I'm just going to be using the watercolor round brush. I'm going to go ahead and speed up the video at this point, and I'll be back in just a minute. We've got all of our flat colors and some of our details blocked in at this point, we'll go ahead and turn our sketch layer off so we can see what's going on here. The last thing that I want to do again, is I'm just going to make a new layer and we're just going to add in our final details. Sticking with the same brush, I'm sticking with the watercolor round detail brush. But because I really want to make sure I'm going to get some nice details here, I want to make sure my flow is turned all the way up and I want to get my waterflow turned all the way down. Again, you remember if we play around with that a little bit, we have got a lot of different ways that our paint will react and behave. It's important for you to go in and really have a play around with this and make sure that you are finding a technique that works really well for you. The reason that I have my settings set like this, is because I want basically this watercolor,"to behave like wash at this point". I want it to be really opaque, so I can go in and add these extra little details and I don't want to have the same water flow that I've been having. Take some time, work on a piece like this, just make some blobs around your screen, and some shapes, see how you can get the paint to behave. I think that those among you who are actual watercolor artists are going to be able to have a lot of fun with this. I know that a lot of you struggle with finding digital brushes that work in a similar way to your paints and I think that this is something that you're really going to love. We're just going to add some details on this mushroom. We can make this a little bit bigger. What I love about these lab brushes is like I said they do behave pretty similarly to real paints. That means you get these nice rough edges like you are lifting your brush up and you were running out of paint. It's such a nice detail to have. Then the last thing that we're going to do is just add in some little details on this guy. Now we are all done with our seconds demo for this class and for this one we just used our live watercolor brushes. You can see it's a lot different than the vector brushes that we were doing earlier. We've got these really nice little soft edges over here. We've got some really nice layering and texturing. If you really play around with us, I think that you're going to find that you really enjoy combining the lasso tool with the watercolor brushes so you can get some beautiful textures and some really beautiful effects. Again, I'll just remind you that you can combine all of these brushes, which again, is it a really amazing thing. You can combine the vector brushes with the live brushes, with the raster brushes and you can make some really gorgeous pieces of ours. I'm really excited to see what you do for the class projects. Head on over to our last demo video and we're going to talk about coloring this illustration using our pixel brushes, which of course is going to be one of my favorites because I'm going to be layering a lot of color and texture, which is my favorite thing to do. I'll see you in the next video.
14. Pixel Painting Demo: In our third and final demo video, we're going to be using our pixel brushes to create a colorful layered illustration. I've done the same thing this time as I did with the last demo. That is just that I duplicated my original file that has my vector art on it. I've got my Sketch Layer turned back on, and then I've just got this vector here just so I can use it for color reference. Again, that's just because I wanted everything to look the same color wise. When we finish this, we can really compare and contrast how the different techniques that we used worked out for us. Let's make sure that we're on a brand new layer, and I'm just going to go ahead and drag this up to the top, maybe. There we go. Just so we can get this file out of the way. There we go. We'll just group that with our color palette. This is our sketch layer, this is the new layer that we're going to be drawing on. This time, like I said, we are going to be using the pixel brushes. I also refer to them as raster brushes because they're your traditional Photoshop brushes that are raster and not vector. When you are working with the live brushes or the pixel brushes, they'll not be infinitely expandable like it is if you're working with just the vector brushes. That's something to keep in mind, if you're used to working in vector, you need to make sure that you're at a size that is going to work for whatever you're creating. Just to make things a little simple, I'm just going to be using two brushes for this demo. The first brush I'm going to use is under dry media and it's going to be the hard pastel brush. I'm just a really big fan of this brush because it's got a lot of really great texture, you can use it for a lot of stuff. I can just draw some little lines. Let's pick our hard pastel brush because that is not correct. Now, let's try it again. I can just draw some light textured lines or if I want to I can press down harder and get a nice full area. Then if I make this brush a little bit smaller, I can actually just use it to block in some black colors, and I'll just have some really nice rough edges. I'm going to be playing a lot in this demo with using the lasso brush paired with this texture brush. We'll have a lot of really fun, playful moments between the nice clean edges up the Lasso tool and then nice texture from the hard pastel brush. The other brush that I want to use is going to be one of the ink brushes and it's going to be the natural anchor. Again, I love this because it does have a really nice texture. This is the one that I was trying to show off before. It just depending on how hard I press on the pen, it can get a really nice line variation here. This is going to be a really great brush to add on like our little details on our mushrooms and the grass and all that other fun stuff. Let's just go ahead. Now we're ready to get started. I'm just going to go ahead and select the blue color that we were using for the background, and I'm going to switch back over to again, Dry Media, hard pastel is the brush that we're going to be working with. Now this time I'm going to start out by using the Marquee tool because I want to have some nice clean edges on our background area. I've got the Marquee tool selected and I'm just going to go ahead and draw in a rectangle shape. Then I'm going to go back to my brush, and let's make this really nice and big. Actually, let's go this way and let's get some horizontal strokes in here, and I'm just going to leave some of the white showing through. While I'm in here, I'm just going to go ahead and just pick a little bit of a darker version of the same blue color, and then we'll just very lightly add on just almost a little bit of a gradient here, just to give ourselves a little bit of extra visual interest. Now, the next thing that I want to do is I want to add in this grassy green area here. Let's go ahead and let's make a new layer. Now I've still got my rectangle selected. I'm going to leave it selected and then I'm going to show you an easy way to take care of this little grassy mossy area. Let's just select our green, and I'm just going to do the same thing I did a second ago. I'm just going to go ahead and block in this grass. I know you're like this is not the grass shape, but I swear we're going to get to that in just a second, so no worries. I'm just going to pick a lighter color here and just do some really light strokes, and that I'm going to do the same thing with a darker color. Since this is moss and I really want to have like a really nice little texture variation. I'm going to deselect this. Now, we're going to go in and fix our mossy shapes, so I'll follow this nice little lines. All I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to my Marquee tool, I'm going to select the Free Form Lasso tool this time. We're just going to go in here, and just select the area that represents the grass, close that off. Now what I've selected is what I don't want, and then I'm just going to go in with my Erase tool, let's just make that way bigger. I've just erased the area that I didn't want, so now I have deselected that. Now, the reason that worked is because I have the grass and the blue on a separate layer. If we didn't have those on a separate layer, it would not work, so that's something to be mindful of. Next up, let's just go ahead and make a new layer, and we're going to start blocking in the mushroom shapes. Let's go ahead and start with the orange one. I think for this time, let's just make our brush quite a bit smaller. Let's see about just drawing this one. Instead of using the Lasso tool, because like I said, I like playing around with the juxtaposition of nice clean edges and rough edges. Again, I'm just going to leave some little hints of the background peeking through. It's not gonna be perfect, I think this just makes it look a little bit more cozy and friendly. Then we'll do our big mushroom, and we're just going to do the same thing. We've got the same brush size selected, and then I'm just going to continue to do this same thing for our three smaller mushroom shapes as well. You see you get a really nice color variation with this hard pastel brush and that's one of the things that I love about it. We have got our flat colors locked in on this piece. We've just been using the hard pastel brush. You're welcome to experiment with any brushes that you want to during this process and to find something that you really like. You can also experiment with mixing the three different types of brushes. You can experiment with mixing the vector, the live brushes, and the pixel brushes. Just again remember that if you're mixing other brushes in with your vector brushes, it's not going to be infinitely scalable, at least that pixelated and live brush parts aren't, so that's something to keep in mind. What we want to do now is just add in some of our little details and then add in some of our grass shapes as well. But first, let's go ahead and let's do a little bit of extra texture on this. Let's be a little bit playful. One thing that Adobe fresco doesn't have right now is clipping masks, which is something that I really love to use. I do miss that in Adobe fresco, but it is going to be coming soon. If you actually go look at the app settings and you go under about, you can get a list of what's coming to Adobe fresco. If you just tap on view what's coming to fresco, you get a list of upcoming features and you see that one right here is clipping masks. These are the other things that are going to be coming also. There's going to be a lot of new stuff. If you're using a later version of this app than I'm using to film this class. You might already have clipping masks, so that would be awesome. But we don't have clipping masks right now. What we do have is layer masks and alpha lock. Let's take a look at one way that we can add some more texture if we want to. We can go back here to our blue layer. Again, I'm just sticking with the same hard pastel brush that I've been using. But I'm just going to make it really big and make it gigantic. Then I'm just going to select my blue color. Apparently not. There we go. I'm going to select my blue color and I'm just going to make a really dark version of it. The way that I'm working right now, if I start drawing, it's going to draw outside of my square. If I want that, that's fine. But if I don't want that, I can just tap on my layer, can lock the layer and now when I'm drawing on it, I can't lock the layer. I'm going to lock the transparency. That's the correct option lock transparency. Now when I draw on it, everything that I draw is just going to stay within the existing rectangle that we've already created. The thing about working like this with the lock transparency is that this is destructive. That means that what is underneath this is gone after I draw on it. If I save this document and leave it, come back into it, I'm not going to have the ability to undo anymore, and this is going to be what it is. While I'm still in here, I can two finger tap and undo to my heart's desire and get all the way back to the original if I want to. Let's go ahead and add a little bit more texture here. Make it really dark. Then I think too, let's go in and add some lightness with this big brush. Give it like a little bit of glow. Then we're going to go over here and we're going to do the same thing with the grass. We're going to lock the transparency. We're going to select a color and then we're going to go in and add some variation. With this one, let's make our brush a little bit smaller. There we go. Really play around with this, with all of these brushes. Just play around and see what sizes work best for you. What effects help you express your style. Maybe we'll do a little bit darker down here at the bottom. I want to be careful with this because I also know that I need to add my grass stalks still and I don't want to go too dark down here. That's something to keep in mind. That's looking pretty good so far. Another way that I've got that I can add texture is I can make a new layer and then use my blending modes to add more texture on top of that. I'm going to go on top of our mushroom cups right here, I'm going to make a new layer. Let's go ahead and switch this to color burn. Then we'll turn the opacity down. We'll start with about 50 percent. I'm just going to go choose a gray color. Now I can just start loosely adding in a little bit more texture. Again, just using the same brush. You don't have to use the same brush. You can switch it up if you want to. You'll notice here that my texture is also going outside with the mushrooms like right here, I'm getting this little bit of texture that's coming outside of the mushroom. I think that's fine right now. If I didn't want that, I could just erase these areas or I can also use the lasso tool to select the area that I want to have my texture in. Let's take a look at that on the next layer, let's make a new layer and on this blending mode, let's just switch it to color dodge we'll make it about 50 percent and then this time I'm going to go grab like a purpley blue color. This time we are going to use our lasso tool. We're going to roughly select the area that we want to work in. This can be perfect or not. It's totally up to you. Now, we're sticking in the same general area. De-select. You'll see how that only worked in the area that I had selected. I'm going to go in here and add a little bit more color variation to these guys. I'm again okay with this bursting at the seams. Because I think it's coming out like a nice little glow almost and I think that's pretty cool. I think the last thing that we want to do is let's just go to this layer that's got our green on it. Let's lock our transparency, select our green. I want to brighten this up a little bit. I think that looks a little better because of how darkly we've done the grass here. I know it doesn't match here 100 percent, but we're going to have to live with that. The next thing we want to do is we're going to make another new layer and then we're going to start adding in our grass shapes. To do that, I'm going to switch over to my ink brush. I'm going to select the natural anchor. Again, it's got this really great texture. This is going to be really super for adding in grass and adding in these other details. We're on our brand new layer. Let's turn our sketch back on again. Let's make this brush bigger. Let's make sure we're on our new layer though right now I'm drawing on my sketch layer and that's no good. That is this illustration all finished. There's one really quick thing that I want to change. You can see I did this line art down here in a lighter green color, and I'm not super happy with it. I'm going to go into the art layer and lock the transparency. Let's try out a different color. Basically, I'm just going to be using the same brush that I already have. I'm just going to make it a little bit bigger, and because I've got that transparency locked, I'm just going to be making changes directly to the line art that is on that layer. Again, this is a destructive change. Other than being able to tap and go back, I'm not going to be able to change this. If I close out of this document and save it. I'm going to play around with a couple of colors here and see if anything works better. I think that's probably a little bit better. It's a little bit more subtle. I think that light color stood out too much. There we go. We've got all three of our different experiments creating this illustration in Adobe fresco. Head on over to the next video. I want to talk really quickly about exporting your files now.
15. Export Your Files: All right, so the last thing that we need to do is talk about how to export your files. Now again, you might want to do this if you are working on a vector file and you want to export a pdf over to Adobe Illustrator, so you can edit it there. If you're working on a Pixel file, you might want to take it over to Photoshop so you can do some final edits and prepare it for print or do any number of other things. All you're going do is this is your home screen, which you'll remember from the beginning of the class, and then these are the pieces that we were working on. All you need to do is go to your cloud documents, find the piece that you want to export, hit the three dots, and then you are going to select Export as PSD, which is going to export this as a Photoshop document. I'm just going to tap on Export and now I'm going to scroll all the way over. I don't see Dropbox listed, which is what I want to export to. So I'm just going to scroll down, find copy to Dropbox. It's going to export it. It's going to open up my Dropbox, and then I just need to pick the location that I wanted to live in, which Work In Progress is fine. Tap on Save, and then it's going to go ahead and save it to my Dropbox. So I can access this from my desktop computer or I can pull it up in another app that I want to work with on my iPad. There are a ton of options there, so it's super easy to export. Yeah, that's basically it. Head on over to the last video and let's talk about your final steps.
16. Your Project: Your project for this class is to create a piece of art using at least one of the three types of brushes in Adobe Fresco. You can choose from vector brushes, pixel brushes, or live brushes. You can also combine the three different types of brushes if you'd like to. Feel free to follow along with the illustration that I created in this class or do your own thing. Don't forget to post your project under the project and resources section of the class and if you share your project on Instagram, be sure to tag me or use the #stephfcskillshare, so I can see your work. Have fun.
Stephanie Fizer Coleman, children's book illustrator/bird artist
