Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Nick. I'm an artist and illustrator in the UK, and I license my work on all sorts of products around the world. In this class, we'll be painting loose and lovely digital watercolors with Adobe Fresco on the iPad. If you've taken some of my classes already, you might have noticed that I'm a little bit obsessed with digital watercolor. I particularly love the live brush watercolors in Adobe Fresco, which mix and blend together beautifully. We'll be focusing on exploring these brushes and using them to paint some fresh fun flowers. I'll also show you a quick and easy way to make them into seamless patterns and ribbon brushes in Adobe Capture. We'll be using the free version of Adobe Fresco and you don't need any prior knowledge to join it. Come on, let's get started.
2. Getting to Know Adobe Fresco: When you go into the app, this is the initial screen. To tap on a new document, tap here. I'm going to start with a custom size. You can make your canvas nice and big, but at the moment, you can't use the live brushes on a really big canvas. I'm going to use the 4,000 square for this one with a white background. Let's have a quick look around. The very top left is little arrow which saves your work and exits to the gallery screen. But Fresco does save your work to the Cloud as you go along. You can tap the three dots menu on the document for some quick actions and also view version history so you can go back to previous safe points if you need to, which is really handy. Let's get back into our new document. Down the left is the toolbar. Every time you see the little triangles, you can press for further options. These panels can be moved around and you can keep them opened or you can close them by tapping the cross on the top right of the panel. Depending on your iPad, the layout might be slightly different. For example, some of the lowest symbols are up on this extra menu at the top. Step 1 is pixel brushes with various different categories. There are a few which are only available with the paid subscription. These have the little blue and white star next to them. If you do have the paid subscription, you can also bring in other brushes. But I'm going to use the free version for this class in order to keep it accessible to everybody. You can select a brush and if you really like it, if you tap on the star, it'll save it to your favorites. This means you can find all your most used brushes really quickly next to the live brushes, which we'll be using in this class. Then the white brushes which are automatically used on separate vector layers. Then we come to the erases. Depending on the kind of layer you're working on, this layer could be vector or pixel erases and there are a few here to choose from. If you're using a pixel or a vector brush, you can also press on the shortcut circle down here to use the same brushes and eraser. It doesn't work with the live brushes though. Then we have the smudge brushes, which are in the same category as the pixel brushes. These are great for blending. To demo this, I'm just using the hard pastel brush in the dry media section. Put down a couple of colors and to use the same brush to smudge with. But of course you can smudge with any brush you like. There is a transform tool where you can move, rotate, and nudge by one pixel. You can scale a selection by dragging from the corners and you can use the touch shortcut to constrain to proportions. You can flip either a whole layer or a selection. This is a selection tool with various options. You can select freehand or polygon, you can select using a paintbrush, and you've got rectangle and oval-shaped selections. Each time we select a new area, it will add to the current selection. There are options at the bottom of the screen to use your selection to transform, erase, or mask that area, and to deselect when you're done. There are more options here too. Next down is the fill tool. Next down is the shape tool and this shows you the shapes that you've got in your library, which you can actually use Adobe Capture to put shapes in there. You can resize, move, and rotate your shapes. There's a little pop-up shape menu at the bottom so that you've got the choice to fill your shape with the current color to use it as a stamp. You can erase the area under it. You can use it as a mask or you can select using No Shape. Tap on the other tool to get rid of that. Then there's a text tool. If you tap onto Canvas, you'll see there's a whole new text layer with all sorts of options available, which I won't go into here. I'll skip over the eyedropper for now, I'll come back to that later. Next, we have the place section where you can take a photo, insert pictures from your camera roll, or bring in files from elsewhere. Then we get to the color and brush settings, which we'll look at in more detail in a minute. There are a lot more things you can do with the touch shortcut. There's a list of all of them along with gestures and keyboard shortcuts at the top right under the question mark menu. To get the primary shortcut, press the circle and when you let go, it deactivates. Alternatively, you can double-tap it, a hands for use, in which case you need to double-tap again to deactivate it. I always forget to do this. The secondary shortcut are the press and then slightly drag outwards or triple-tap, and then triple-tap again to deactivate. There are lots of uses for the touch shortcut and the ones I use most of the erase with current brush if you're using a pixel vector brush. With the live brush, paints with clear color. You can drag the shortcuts circle to a convenient place on Canvas. If you're left-handed, you might want to stick it over on the other side. Along the top bar in the center is the name of your canvas and you can rename it here, and you can also save it as you go. Next to that is the zoom level. You can type in the value you want or you can slide left or right to zoom. You can also zoom with a two-finger pinch or spread. To fit to view, you can use a quick two-finger pinch. Over to the top right, we have the undo and redo. You can also use a two-finger tap to undo and three fingers for redo. Symbol with the person and the plus is to invite other people to edit your document. Then next to the export options with even more options available too. Cog is the Settings menu for the document. Tap on the name to change it. Change the canvas size or flip or rotate it. You can disable the touch shortcut here. Using the artboards preview will remove completely anything that's hanging off the canvas. You can access the app settings here too and customize it to your liking. One thing I like to do is input, touch. I switch on the snap line, which means I can make a really straight line by holding at the end little straightish stroke. I don't think I going to be that much in class, but it's a handy thing to know. It's worth looking in the experimental section to see if there's anything you'd like to try. Then on the furthest top right, is a full swing arrow. Tap again to go back. Okay, just the right side to go now and this is all to do with layers. First is the hide and reveal layers button. I absolutely love that there are no layer limits in Fresco. That's one of its really good plus points, hurray. There are different symbols for different layer types. The active layer has a thicker blue line around it. You can press then drag a layer up or down to change the order in the stack. Long press and drag layers on top of each other in order to group them or you can use the modifier and select multiple layers at once and then press the little file, simple. That's when you want to group them. Double-tap on the grid to see the individual layers within it and then tap the back arrow to return to the main layer view. Plus adds a new pixel or vector layer above the currently selected one. If you don't specify the layer type, Fresco will automatically choose once you've started drawing on it. The eye symbol hides or shows the active layer. Next is the clipping mask symbol to clip the active layer to the layer below. This means that the clipped layer only shows above the contents of the layer below. This is a nice way of working non-destructively. The three dots brings up a whole load of more layer options, which I won't go through bit by bit. But this is where you can delete or clear layers. Right to the top and below the layers is the layer properties. You can see the kind of layer and you can change the blend mode and the layer opacity here. Text layers show various text options as well. Then we have the precision section with snapping and alignment guides. Next is the speech bubble for comments. Then at the lower right, this little symbol has the drawing aids, so it has a ruler. Then it has various shapes: circle, square, and polygon. With polygon, you can increase or decrease the number of sides.
3. Using Color: Now we know where everything is, let's have a better look at the color palettes. If you tap on the round color swatch it brings up the color menu. We have a color wheel along with a square to choose the colors and you can pick the color from the wheel and then fine tune it in the square. There's also pure white, a pure black, and transparent in these little circles, there is an opacity slider beneath it. Next are the hue, saturation and brightness sliders and you can tap on the numbers to enter a particular value. If you tap on the three dots, you can swap to RGB if you prefer. Next down are the all and recent swatches. All has fresco colors and themes and any themes or swatches from your Adobe libraries. Recents is very handy and exactly as it sounds, you can pick some colors and just dab them onto the canvas and they'll appear in your recent section. Or you could bring in a photo on your camera roll and use the color picker to choose some colors, which is activated with the long press and if you just dab these onto the canvas again, you're going to put them into your recent section so it's a good way of building a palette. You can also tap on the eyedropper symbol on the left-hand side in the toolbar to bring it up. In the top right corner you can see the color you're picking along with the HSB numbers. There's also an option for a multi-color eyedropper, which works with most pixel brushes and with all the live brushes. You can access this by either tapping the eyedropper and then tapping the lower circle here and depending on your iPad's model, it might appear up here and also some of the brush settings do as well. Or by first either holding or else double tapping the little modifier circle, which is the touch shortcut, and then long pressing for the picker. You can see the multiple colors in the color swatch and you're sampling exactly what shows in the inner circle of the picker and you can also see in the top right corner, it says multiple colors. You can change the eye view by zooming in or out and this changes the multiple colors you're selecting. You can do some interesting things with this. For example, I'm going to sample this broccoli, which I can then use as a broccoli stamp. If you size it up too big, it might get a bit fuzzy but as you can imagine, this opens up a whole load of new possibilities. Of course, you can just use it as a multi-colored brush and these multicolor swatches also show up in your recents along with your normal colors.
4. Watercolor Live Brushes: Let's try out the live brushes. In this class we're using the watercolor ones. Below the color swatch is the brush size slider. Just going to change brushes. Next down is flow, which is how much pigment is on the brush like transparency. Sometimes when the brush is more transparent, in other words, when the flow is lower, you can see the texture affects better. If you want a more opaque look, more like glass paint, take the flow right up. I like to use the watercolor round detail with the flow at 50 percent for the initial layers. Then I can get up to 100 for the top layer of detail to get the maximum opacity. Water flow is how much water is loaded on the brush and it affects how it blends with the other colors and how it spreads on the Canvas. The higher it is, the more blending and spreading you get. You can play with the brush settings too. There's a live test Canvas at the top to try out any modifications. We mentioned that the brush stroke is made up from multiple stumps of the brush tip. The angle changes the angle of the stamps. Spacing stretches out the distance between the stamps along the stroke. Scatter moves to the stamps away from the straight path and this can be nice for getting a more textured edge to a stroke. In the shape dynamics, you can change the size and the angle jitter, which really means randomness. You can change how is controlled. You can alter how the size and flow change with the pressure and also with the speed that you're drawing. You can customize how the brush works with the pen pressure. At the very bottom, you can reset your brush. Let's start with the clear Canvas and try the brushes out. I'm going to start with the watercolor round detail and with all the standard settings. With this brush, the harder I press, the wider and more opaque the stroke gets. Let's try stamping with the brush. I'm going to draw some lines and see how the pigment flows where they overlap. I'll draw in a couple of squares next to each other in different colors and see how the paint mixes where they touch. I'll try dropping in some color. It's also good to see what happens when you pop in some white. Something I love about these brushes is that they will remain wet even if you save and close the Fresco app and come back later. You can dry your layer if you want to in the layers three dots menu. But I prefer to leave my layers wet and work on a separate layer for wet-on-dry effects. I'm going to try the brush in different sizes. Then I'm going to take the flow down to 50 percent for the next few experimental strikes. With the size back down to normal I'll pop in a couple of squares. Then I'm going to take the water flow up to 100 percent for this lower one one see how it blends. I should have done the top one first, oops. That's on the original 60 percent water flow setting for comparison. I want to take some notes, so I'll do that on a new layer which I'll just drag underneath for now. I'm going to go to the pixel brushes and in the sketching section, I'm using the pen to make my notes of which brush and settings I've used before I forget. Now I'm going to reset my brush and I'll draw three squares. In the first one, I'll fill it in just with the regular brush. In the second one, I'm going to take down the flow to 50 percent to fill the center in. In the last one, I'm going to fill it in with clear water by pressing on the touch shortcut. You can see there's a little blue rectangle top right which says, pure water. Alternatively, you could double-tap the touch shortcut but you have to remember to double-tap again when you're done. I always forget that. You can also use clear water to spread the paint out from the edges as well. Now I'm going to do the same with all the other brushes. The watercolor wet splatter, I'll leave till the end because it works differently. I strongly suggest that you take some time now to go and just play with these brushes and see what you can do with them. Because what you do with them might not be the same as what I do with them. You might press harder, you might have a lighter touch. That's with all our materials, you really need to get familiar with them and just get comfortable with using them in order to get the best results. Now I've tried out all the main four brushes and I can refer back to this if I want to. I'm going to hide the test and the notes layer, most often a fresh layer just to try out the watercolor wet spatter. If you use different colors, they can blend together. Of course, you can change the flow and the water flow on this but it doesn't make that much difference. Going back to my main test layer, I'm going to try combining the spatter with the existing paint. That gives an interesting effect where it blends with the wet paint. What I really love about this brush is using it with pure water to give the edges a lovely wet spreading effect, doesn't that look gorgeous? In this class, you'll hear me say defused a lot. What I mean by that is using the watercolor wet spatter with the pure water setting. You can use these live brushes on top of the pixel brushes to wet them like I'm doing here with the writing which opens up so many possibilities.
5. Using Other Brushes: You can also use the live brushes on top of the pixel brushes. Some of the pixel brushes actually look quite water-colorish anyway, so you might want to mix them in. Pixel brushes have different settings. Instead of the water flow, they have smoothing, which just basically smooths out any bubbles in your strike. In the brush settings for the pixel brushes, there are some different options to play with too. So I suggest you just have a bit of a tryout with these to see what works best with your style. Remember, you can always reset your brushes. My favorite pixel brushes for a watercolor look are in the painting section. The color fill brush is pressure-sensitive, so you can use a lighter touch to blend out the edges. When you take the pen off the canvas with these brushes, that stroke is now dry. That's where they differ in quite a big way from the live brushes. You can layer on more strokes but they won't blend together. You can use the smudge brushes, and I'm using the same brush for this to just smoosh them together a little bit. This looks better on some brushes than others. You can go back to the live brush water colors and use the watercolor wet spatter with clear water to give more of a wet look to it, which is something that I like to do. In the same pixel brush painting section, I also like the Ruffin brush. Here it is layered with another color, and we'll use it as a smudge brush. This is what it looks like, diffused with the live brush watercolor wet spatter. In the same section, the wet brush 1 and 2 also look like watercolor. Here's the wet brush 1, wet brush 2. I'll go to the smudge brushes and use each brush to smudge itself, and I'll diffuse both of them again with the live brush water color wet spatter. Of course, you can try them with the other live brushes too, with or without clear water. Another favorite is in the pixel brush dry media section, the soft chalk. Well, this one doesn't look quite so much like paint to start with. It works really well when it's diffused with the wet spatter. But first, I'm just going to use it as a smudge brush, and then here it is diffused with the spatter. Then in the pixel brush inking section, there are lots of lovely ink brushes for highlights and for details, so try them out and choose your favorite. I really loved the blotty ink, and I also like the regular pen from the sketching section. You can lay down these pixel brushes and then you can use the live paint brushes over the top to wet them. It's a bit like spring water over ink or watercolor pencils. You can add more marks with the pixel brushes, and these will go on as if they're dry. You can keep layering up your wet and dry media. Take the time to go and experiment for yourself and decide on some favorite brushes and combinations, and then join me in the next video, and we'll get started on the class project.
6. Painting Flowers: The project for this class is to use the life brush watercolors in combination with some of the pixel brushes to paint some loose and lovely flowers. I chose flowers because you can't really paint them badly, which means that you can concentrate on getting the beautiful watercolor effects and having fun experimenting with the brushes and you'll still end up with something fabulous. I'm starting with a fresh canvas, 4,000 pixels square with a white background. Let's start by making our color palette. Grab a brush. It doesn't matter which one, but I'm using the hard round brush in the basic section just in case you want to know. I've got some colors already in my library which I want to use. But you could start from a photo like I showed you before or else just use the color wheel or HSB sliders, it's up to you. The main thing is to put a little dab of each color on the canvas so that they show up in your recent section. I start with a range of colors, although I don't always end up using them all. I haven't decided yet if I want leaves and stems in my picture, so I'll pop in some foliage colors for now and see what happens. It's always good to have a dark color in there too, so I think purple would look good. All of these dabs are now in my recent section ready to use. I'm going to hide that layer by tapping on the eye icon on the right. I'm going to lock it as well so that I don't accidentally paint on it by tapping the three dots and choosing lock layer. Tap the plus for a new layer to start on. For the first flower, I'm going to use wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques, similar to working with real watercolors. I just start with the dark color. In the live brush watercolors, I'm using the watercolor brush soft. The settings are just the standard ones. I haven't altered anything. To loosely block in some petal shapes and an extra dab in the middle to give some darker pigment. This is the wet-on-wet technique where the wet paint blends and mixes together. Sometimes mixing the colors gives you this grayish color around the edges, which I don't like very much. I'll tap with two fingers to undo and add a new layer for my line to cover. Now this is wet-on-dry, like cutting wet watercolor onto paint which has already dried. I'll change the watercolor wet spatter brush and double-tap on the touch shortcut for clear water to diffuse the pigment. Double-tap again to cancel the clear water setting and then add another layer. I'm still using the spatter brush this time with red to spatter the center. I can use the eraser to get rid of any stray bits I don't want. Don't be too precious about it though because these are meant to be loose and a bit random. That's the first flower done. I'm going to double-tap on the touch shortcut again in the same way as I would to use the clear water, but in this case, it'll let me pick multiple layers by tapping on them. I'll tap on the little folder icon over here to group them. I want to put each flower in its own group. This will allow me to move it around and transform it if I want to, and also we're going to make a pattern when we finish painting. This will be important for that too. If the whole flower is on the single layer, that would be absolutely fine. Start a new layer for the next flower, remembering to double-tap the touch shortcut again to cancel it. I'm using the watercolor wash soft again and I'll make another flower the same way. I can encourage the pigment to spread with pure water. On a new layer, I'll dab in the middle and I'll diffuse it with the spatter light before on the pure water setting. Again, I'll add some spattered paint on another layer on top for the middle. I'll go back to the first layer on this flower and just soften and diffuse the edges of the petals a bit with the clear water spatter. Although I love doing this, and I use it a lot, it's important to show a little bit of restraint and not to diffuse everything, leaving plenty of the harder edges so that you give your painting a varied and interesting look. I'll group that flat together like before. I'll do one more like that on a new layer. I'll use the watercolor wash flat to see what difference that makes. I'm going to drop a bit darker color into the middle of the wet layer. I just love the way that paint makes this. On a new layer, I'll dab in some more of that color and diffuse it before adding more spattered paint onto a new layer and ripping that flower. Another new layer and let's do something else. This one is like glazing real watercolor in thin layers, letting the lower layer dry before adding another on top. I'm going to use the watercolor wash soft, and this time I'll take the flow down to about halfway to make it a bit more transparent. Draw three roundish petals, and I'm going to fill them in and dab in some more paint in the middle. Don't really like how that spreads, so I'm going to use some clear water with the same brush to help it along. On a new layer, I'm going to do the same thing again with the petals overlapping because I took the flow down the paints more transparent, which means you get this pretty layered glazed effect. This would look lovely using different colors layered on top of each other too. On a new layer, I'm going to dab on a darker color for the middle and diffuse that. Then on another layer, I'm picking the watercolor round detail brush and I'm going to make some marks on the petals. Then I'll go a bit darker and I'll put some little dots in the middle. I'll group these layers together. That flower is far bigger than I wanted, so with the group selected, I'll choose the Transform tool and I'll use the corner note to scale it down and move it out of the way. When we finished all the flowers, we'll have a bit of a move about, but this, we'll just get it out of the way for now. Then I'll tap down at the top right here. On a new layer, I'll pick the watercolor wash flat on its original settings. I'm going to take the size up to around 300 and then I'll roughly block in five petals, leaving a hole in the middle. Then I'll dab a darker color into the middle. Because it's just a bit where the two colors meet, I'll blend them together, it's a slightly different look. Then I'll use the watercolor round detail to drop in some color into the wet edges of the petals. I can also start a bit further out from the edges so that the paint's going on to just the fresh paper, which gives it a bolder color, similar to what I did in the center. I'll go for a new layer and add some stripes, varying the pressure so that they also get some variation in the line width and the paucity. You don't have to add stripes to the whole petal area if you don't want to. I like it with just a few. I'll pop in a bit of spatter too and then I'll add a new layer. Using a watercolor round detail brush, I'll put some of this lighter color in the center and diffuse it. Then I'll add one more layer with some dark spatter. It looks like a weird poisonous flower. I think this one might not make it to the final edit, but I'll decide on that later. I'll group all those layers and I'll make a new layer for the next one.
7. More Flowers: This one's going to be using a line and wash technique. I'm starting with the watercolor round detail on the original settings. I'm drawing some petals, bearing the pressure. Next, I'll draw in some lines, and then I will diffuse some of the areas. Then I'll make a new layer, and I'm going to drag it down underneath the first layer by just tapping and holding on it and pulling it down. Using the Watercolor wash soft on the standard settings, I'm going to take a pale color and roughly draw in a loose wash under the petals. Don't be too perfect. It shouldn't be like a coloring page. Leave gaps and stray outside the lines, leave dangerously. Here is mine with the top layer switched off, and it's a bit of a mess, but that's fine. I'll tap in and touch with a different color to make it more interesting too. Then I'll diffuse it a little bit. I'll group the layers together, and then we'll move on to the next one. Another line and wash for this one, which will be based on the side view of a puppy. I'm going to start with the watercolor wet spatter with clear water just to lay down a base, which you can't see because it's clear. This will make it a bit more unpredictable when I draw on top of it. Randomness is always good in my opinion. Particularly when you are painting. Using the Watercolor wet detail with the flow about halfway, I'll draw in the petals. It's already diffusing where it hits the spatter. Poppies are very creased, so I'll draw in some lines to show that. I'll put the flow back to 100 to give some tonal variation to the lines. With real-world color, the stripes variance you make them depending on how much water or paint you've just loaded onto your brush. I'm just going to add a bit more pigment to some of these existing lines. Then I'll switch the same brush to clear water, and I'll roughly fill in some sections in a bit of a scribbly way leaving plenty of gaps. I'll diffuse some bits to with the wet spatter. It's all one layer, so no need to group it. I'm going to make another one the same on a new layer. Again, first some clear spatter, then draw in the petal outlines and creases using the Watercolor round detail. Fill some bits in with clear water, and diffuse. I'm just going to draw up in here a touch of the other color just to make it a bit more fun. Another new layer for another line and wash flower. This time, watercolor was soft to start with, and I'm roughly blocking out a flower shape. Change to a dark color, and drop some into the edges, and let it mix itself around. On a new layer, I'm going to use the regular pen from the pixel brushes to join some stripes. You don't have to do stripes, of course, I think I'm a bit obsessed with stripes at the moment. I'm using the watercolor wet spatter for the middle. Then I'll switch to clear water to diffuse some of the lines a little bit. Then I'll go back to the layer underneath and diffuse it just a little too. Just makes everything look a bit more watery and a bit cooler in my opinion. I'll group these two together. This one looks a bit like spring water on top of ink lines. Are you ready for some more flowers? Here we go. Let's paint a rose. On a new layer, I'm using the watercolor wash flat on the regular settings. I'm going to paint a spiral for the center, just something not too regular. Then I'm going to use the watercolor round detail. I'm going to choose a lighter color and I'll loosely draw in some petal shapes. I'll have a look at this and look at where the shadows would be, and that's where I'm going to diffuse. The base of the petals and keep it loose and irregular. I'll use the watercolor round detail to just drop in a bit of darker color here and there. There's only a single layer, so I don't even need to group this one. Let's do another rose in the same way. I'm just drawing a rough spiral, adding some petals and diffusing where the shadows would be. This time I'm going to add another layer beneath the lines and just pop in a light wash, which I'll also diffuse. Then group this together. Remember when we use the multi-color picker to sample the broccoli. Well, we can make a rose stamp brush the same way. I'll tap on the color picker, and I'll choose the "Multicolor" option. Then I'll zoom right out so that the whole rose is inside the color picker circle. Then I'll switch to the pixel brushes, and I'll choose the basic section with the hard round brush. Now that works as a rose stamp. You can increase the size too if you want to. I'm not going to use this in my artwork this time, but it's a fun thing to know. Time for a break and join me in the next video for some more flowers.
8. Even More Flowers: Next, let's try using the pixel brushes. This one a soft chalk. It's just a simple circle and then I'll diffuse it to make it look more like watercolor. It's got really nice variation and pigment when you do this. I'll use the blotty ink to draw on the same layer. Because it's a pixel pen and not live paint, it won't mix with what's below it. Then I can diffuse all of it to make it run a little bit. Then I'll put in a new layer and I'll use the watercolor wash soft for the center, and then I'll diffuse that, and clip those layers. Let's try the roughen brush next, it's got a lovely painty texture and I'll use the same brush on the same layer for the center. Colors won't mix because it's not a live paintbrush. But if I want to circle it I just smudge it using the roughen as a smudge brush, or use something else as a smudge brush, or I could diffuse it using one of the live brushes with the water setting but I do like it just the way it is, so I'm going to leave it. Let's do a roughen brush rose. I'm starting with a lighter pink, and then I'm going to add a darker middle using a lighter touch at the edges to make them appear a bit more blended. Then on a new layer using the watercolor round detail brush with the opacity lowered, I'll pop in a few lines to suggest the petals, maybe even just the shadows of the petals. Diffuse a little on either or both layers, if you want to and then group them. Now I'm going to use the pixel brushes, Wet Brush 2. The texture in the edge is changed throughout the stroke, so it's a really fun brush to play with, I love that wet edge look it has. I'm going to diffuse it, and you can see it has a lot of tonal variation when you do that. I'll use the watercolor wet detail on the same layer and draw in a rough spiral for the petals, and then a bit of paint splatter in the middle. These little circles are a really fun way of experimenting with all the different brushes and combinations. For this next one, I'm going to concentrate on getting some interesting textures to start with. I'll use the watercolor wet spatter to lay down a base. Then using a lighter color and the watercolor wash soft, I'll paint over it. Look at that gorgeous texture. It looks a bit like when you sprinkle salt onto wet watercolor wash, or maybe when you add watercolor pencil shavings to a wash. I'm going to add a new layer, and then the pixel brushes, I'll choose something opaque, in this case the blotty ink. Use pure white and draw a simple flower shape. Then I'm going to choose the Fill tool on the left, and I'll tap on the flower to fill it. If you look closely, you can see that it's left a little margin around the edge which we don't want. I'm going to do the two finger tap to undo. I'll go down to the Fill Settings down here, although on your iPad they might be somewhere else. I need to adjust the color margin and because this is a very opaque brush I can slide this all the way up and try again, that's much better. So what I'm going to do now is tap in the layer and drag it beneath the salty wash layer. Then I'll select the wash layer and tap on the clipping mask symbol, which looks like a downward arrow in a box. So what that done done, is constrained my texture layer so that the only bits you can see now, are where there's something on the layer below it. The full wash is still on the top layer, so diffusing it won't work. But if I wanted to, I could diffuse the base layer with the white flower on, which means the texture layer will show over the new diffused bits, I hope that makes sense. I'll just unclip the top layer and put the white layer on top so you can see what I mean. So after pushing them back where they should be, I'll add a new layer and I'll spat in the middle with a light color, and then I'll group it as always. In this one, I'm starting with the Blotty Ink Pixel Brush for the outline and I'm going to use this bluey color so you can see it properly. Then I'll use the Fill tool with the Color Margin set high to tap on the shape to fill it, and then I'll choose white and fill again, and it's there even though you can't see it against the white background, you have to trust me on this and make a new layer, and I'll clip it to the one below. Then I'm going to use the watercolor wet spatter to spray paint over the area, and because it's clipped, it only shows where the white flower is on the layer below. Bit like using a stencil, and to add another color on the same layer and just let the paint mix, and you can encourage it with some clear water spatter too if you want to. Then I'm going to diffuse the white flower layer like I did before, and I'll add a new layer and drawing some lines with the blotty ink, and then I'll rip it all. I want to show you two different ways of using clipping masks which give you different results. It's good to know both of these so that you can be a bit more in control of what you're doing. First, I'm using the blotty ink pen to draw in these lines. On a new layer, I'm going to use the watercolor wash soft to paint in a little circle. On one side, I've pressed a bit harder and it's more opaque, and where I've used the lighter touch, you can see through to the stripes on the layer below. Then I'm going to use a different color and on a new layer, and it's drawing a stripe. I'm pressing harder at first, which makes it more opaque, and then using lighter pressure towards the other side for more transparency. Then I'll select both of those layers and I'll tap on the three dots on the Layer menus and duplicate the layers, and then to use the Transform tool to move the top ones across, and then I'll tap down. These two are exactly the same. On the right side, I'm going to clip the yellow stripe onto the red circle below. You can see that the yellow is now much more transparent compared to the one on the left. You can see all of the purple stripes through it, and that's because the red layer is very transparent in that area, so not as much as the yellow will stick to it when clipped. Sometimes, this can really dilute your top layer, make it difficult to see. So if you want to get around this, you will need the lowest layer in the clip stack to be opaque. But three variations of transparency in the red circle look good. So if it was solid, it would look a bit panse and it would lose all the lovely layering watercolor qualities. So what I need to do is add an extra layer, I'll use an opaque pen like the blotty ink that we've been using, and I'll a pale color, white's best for this really, but I'm just going to show you with a pale color so that I can demonstrate it better. I'm going to draw in a circle over the top and then use the Fill tool to fill it in. Then I'm going to drag it down below my red circle so it acts as a base. For the moment, it all looks exactly the same apart from the fact that you can't see the purple stripes through the opaque layer. If I then click my red circle to the opaque circle below it, suddenly the top yellow stripe is bright and opaque again. If I click the left yellow stripe to the red circle below it, it's transparent and pale in comparison. So they each look lovely in different ways, but it's good to know that you can have both options. I'm going to use this method to make the next flower, so I'll use the blotty ink to join a flower shape, and then I'll fill it. I'll change it to a lighter color for now so we can still see it but it's pale. On a new layer using the watercolor wash soft, I'll paint a wash over the whole flower shape, and then I'll dab some more color into the middle. Then I'll clip it onto the flower layer below, and now I'll nip into that flower layer and fill the flower with whites, so that it won't affect the finished flower color. I'll add a new layer on top, and now I can layer in some more colors. So again, this is like glazing layers of the transparent watercolor, and clip that one to the layer below it and it still retains its original capacity. I'll just diffuse it, and then I can keep adding as many transparent clipping layers as I want. This is a great way of getting some beautiful textures and color mixes. In the next video, we'll make a few adjustments and then we'll do some cool things with our finished artwork.
9. Finishing Touches: This is what I have so far. I'm going for a scattered flatly style of composition, and I've decided not to draw in the new leaves. You might prefer to add some foliage or to arrange the flowers into a bouquet or different compositional together. Because each flower is in it's own group, it's easy to move them around and resize them. But before I do that, I'll go back to the main gallery and I'm going to use the three dots menu to duplicate my files so that I can go back to it if I need to. Back in the file, I'm going to use the transform tool. I'm going to move things around, scale, and rotate. You don't have to press down between each one, just tack on another flower and transform that, and then the next until you are happy with it. Of course, it's never a great idea to make things bigger as they lose quality and can look pixelated. When you're happy with it, tap "Done". It'll tell you that anything hanging off the edge of the canvas will get cropped. Just going to say okay to that. Now I'm going to fill in the gaps with some new flowers, balance out the colors, and generally [inaudible] it. Now I've finished, I need to export it. I'll go to Export in the top-right, and there are lots of choices. I'll choose Publish and Export, then Export as, then choose the format you want. I'm going for high-quality and export. We're not finished yet, though there's a whole load of other fantastic things so you can do with our flowers. Join me in the next video and I'll show you some of them.
10. Use Adobe Capture to Make Patterns: I'm just going to show you something else you can do with Fresco, which is really cool. It's another reason to put each flower or element on its own layer or its own [inaudible]. You'll need Adobe Capture on your iPad for this. I'm signed in with my Adobe ID, so I'm ready to go. I'm going to Export in the top right, and then into the Publish and Export menu, and I'll choose Capture pattern. If you have loads of flowers like I do it might take a while. But you can do this with just a few elements by hiding the ones that you don't want using the eye symbol. Now it's taken me into Capture and each flowers here as an element. It's mostly evened out all the sizes too. Select the ones you want to use and I'll try selecting all of them here. Although it's probably better just to stick to the ones you want to use in your pattern, and I'll press "Done." That's okay because I chose so many. Here we are. It's made four of my flowers into a pattern. I can tap the shapes on the left to show all of my flowers and I can swap them out by dragging and dropping them. If I tap on the flower, I can resize or rotate it. On the right, I can tap on the menu here and there are some other pattern tile shapes. These hexagon tiles only have three elements in them. I'll go back to the square shape and I'm going to tap "Save". Now it's asking me which library I want to save in. It's saved to My Library along with some that I made earlier. If you tap on the three dots menu beneath the pattern, there's a whole lot more you can do. All Share options here show the pattern as a tile. Open in gives you the option to send your tile to Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Mine opened in Photoshop at 4000 pixels square at 72 DPI. You can also use vectors in Fresco to make vector patterns in Capture. But hey, that's a whole other topic. If you choose Edit from the three dots menu, it takes you back in. But it's worth knowing that all of your unused flowers have vanished, which means that it's definitely only worth bringing in the ones that you want to use. Everything that's in my tile is still showing up. From the library, you can tap on the pattern for a full view and you can pinch to zoom in and out to see it better. There are more options along the bottom. This time Save To Camera Roll will save the full pattern, which isn't a perfect tile, but it would be great as a background. You can save the tile to Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop from the second icon along just the same as before. The third one lets you reuse your patterns to do even more things in Capture. The last one on the lower right is another edit the same as before. There are lots of options here and it's a nice, quick, and easy way of using flowers in a regular pattern. But what if you want a more random organic pattern? Let's do that. In Fresco, I've gone to Export in top right, then to the Publish and Export menu and chose Capture pattern. Obviously, if you know you want to do this kind of pattern to start with, you wouldn't have to do this twice. But I wanted to show you the regular pattern first before moving on to this option. Here we are back in Capture. On the right under the Properties menu, there's also a Free Form Grid option, which makes things a lot more exciting. This works with the square tile and also with the hexagons for different kinds of patterns and you really need to decide which you want before you start building your pattern. I'm going to stick to the square and keep Snap To Grid option off. What I can do now is tap on the flower and I can move it anywhere I want. I can rotate and resize it. I can also tap on the shapes on the left side and add more flowers in by pressing and dragging each one onto the tile. With this option, you are not limited to just four elements. Although I find that the more I'm having the tile the slower it gets. As with all seamless patterns, what goes off one edge of the tile appears on the opposite one. This makes it really easy to see what your finished pattern will look like as you're building it. It's actually fantastic. I love it. You can change the dim preview too to make it easier to see what you're doing. I want quite a lot of flowers in my tile, so I need to scale them down to fit them all in. Mine are also quite evenly sized. But you could vary more if you prefer. I'm going to speed this up so you don't die of boredom. I could fiddle with this forever, but I think that looks good now. It's a fantastic and intuitive way of making a seamless pattern. If I decide that this point to use one of the other shapes, it just lumps them all together, which might look good, I guess, but I'm not particularly keen on this. The hexagonal tiles export to Photoshop. It's a rectangular seamless tile which came out at 4000 by 6000 pixels at 72 DPI. I'm going to go back to my square setting and I'll save that out. This is what the finished tile looks like. If you go back into Edit It now, all the flowers you've used on the canvas is still there. Here it is. It's a pattern. I absolutely love this. It's a really cool way of making seamless patterns. In the next video, we'll be making a brush out of our pattern.
11. Make Brushes From Your Patterns: There's one more fun thing here I want to show you. We can use our flower pattern in Adobe Capture to make a fresco brush. I'm going to get back to the first grid pattern for this. I'll tap on it in my library and then in reuse section, I'm going to choose ''New Brush.'' I need to move this slider on the right-hand side, and if I move it all the way down, the white background will be included and I don't want that. I'll move it up a little bit until the background disappears, leaving the grid showing through. But I also want to make sure the cream flower still shows up. That looks good to me. I'll tap on the tick on the far right edge. This screen roll all the brush choices and are loads of different options here. But I'm going to scroll down to the fill color options in the Fresco ribbon brushes section. The third one down gives a stretch ribbon look, which is cool, but it's not what I'm after. First two look very similar and I'm going to go for the second one. I'll tap ''Crop'' at the top, and this changes how the brush works. In this case, I want to roll the pattern onto the Canvas. I can see that the flowers on each end match. You should be seeing this. I'm going to put the guides all the way to the left and right sides, and then bring the top and bottom ones towards the center a bit. There aren't any partial flowers showing on the top and bottom edges. Then I'll tap on the ''Settings'' at the top. I'll take size all the way up. You can resize it later while you're using it in Fresco to make it smaller if you want to. I'll leave the flow and I'll leave it in color. You can choose between linear, which is giving me a few ghost flowers, mirror or stretch. I'll stick to mirror here. Everything else I'll leave. But of course, it's fun to try out all the different versions, so do feel free to explore. I'll tap on ''Refine'' at the top. This is another place you can use the slider to decide how much of the background to keep in or get rid off just like we already did. Two looks good. I'll tap ''Save'. ' I'll rename the brush, and I'll save it to my library. Now back in Fresco, and I'll go into the pixel brushes. In the main brush menu, I'll scroll down until I find my library. There's my brush so I'll choose it, and let's try it out. I can draw a reasonably straight line and hold at the end for it to snap straight because I put that option on earlier in the settings. How cool is that? I'm not really sure how to use this brush, but I just love it. Of course you can do with this with your other pattern as well. Your more organic one. I'm back in Capture and I'm going to tap on the ''Reuse'' icon. I'll choose new brush., and I'm just going to go through the same process. I'm adjusting the slider to include more of the petals and not the background. Then I'll press ''Tick'' when I'm done. I'll scroll down to find the second Fresco brush option. Then I'm going to go to the crop section. I'll take those sliders all the way to the left and the right. I can't change the top and bottom ones here because it's going to cut off some of the flowers, whatever I do, as they're not in a grid formation. Again, I'll take the size all the way up in the settings but I'm just going to leave everything else. I'll go to refine and I'll leave that because I've done that bit. Then I'll choose ''Save'' and then I'll get back into Fresco and try it out. Fantastic. There are loads of possibilities and things you can do this, and there's so many more settings and capture that I won't go into in this class.
12. Final Thoughts & Project Details: Well, that was fun. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. We've learned a lot about using Fresco live brush watercolors. We've painted lots of flowers, we've made some quick decor, just patterns and some fun flower brushes. I hope you feel inspired to explore Adobe Fresco further because there are so many other things that you can do with it. Your project for this class is to paint some of your own flowers or something else using watercolor live brushes. You can follow the methods I demonstrated or of course, you can use the brushes in your own way if you prefer. You love to see patterns and flower brushes too, so put those into the project section as well if you want to. I always look at the pasted projects, I really love seeing what you do. If you enjoyed this class, please do leave a recommendation. It'll help other people to find my classes as well. If you want to be kept up to date with my new classes, please be sure to follow me on Skillshare and do feel free to post in social media too using the #nicsquirrellskillshare. Thank you for joining me and bye for now.
Nic Squirrell, Artist and illustrator
