Paint a Sunset sky with Adobe Fresco

1. Intro : Hello, everyone, and welcome to a class on how to paint a breath taking sunset sky using Adobe Fresco. I'm thrilled to have you here today. Whether you're a seasoned artist or just starting out, you're in for an exciting journey. My name is Ashwin, and over the next hour, we'll dive into the techniques and tips to create stunning digital artwork of a sunset sky. Adobe fresco is a fantastic tool for digital painting, and I'm excited to guide you through this process step by step. We'll start from scratch by setting up our canvas and selecting our colors. Then we'll explore how to create a gradient effect of the setting sun and blend those beautiful warm tones seamlessly into the horizon. Throughout the class, you can see me paint at stroke so you can follow along with me. Feel free to pause, rewind, or just speed things up. This class is all about exploring creativity at your own pace. By the end of our session, you'll have a stunning sunset sky painting that you can be proud of. Let's dive in and unleash your artistic talents with Adobe fresco. 2. Sketch: This video, we will learn how to set up our artboard and sketch. As you can see, I have my iPad in the portrait mode. I'm going to go ahead and just click on create new going to digital and click on current screen size. Okay, so once I have this, I can immediately start drawing, but I have a reference image for this video. So to use that and show you guys together, it'll be a lot easier if I move my iPad into landscape mode. So I'm just going to do that. I'm just going to switch it up like this. There you go. That's our artboard, and obviously, I'm going to turn it so that it fits in my screen right here. Perfect. You don't have to do all these things, but if you want to use the reference image, when you're drawing, then it's a good idea to actually flip it like this so that you can keep the reference image here. I'm going to make sure I go to settings and then switch off the artboard preview. What this does is, it lets you put your images right the side out of the artboard. I'll quickly show you what it does. Go ahead and download the reference image. There's no sketch or color palette for this video because we're not going to be using any. Once you've downloaded it, click on your photos or files or wherever you have it and bring it into artboard. That's my photo. I'm going to click here on this handle, and I'm going to rotate my 90 degrees. I have my snapping turned on. That is, I'm just going to click on De now and explain what it means. You can just go into grid here and click on snapping and you can turn on snapping and you can either do 45 or 90 degrees and help you rotate it very nicely. Okay, so I'm just going to go that back. Now, I'll go back to the layer. I'll press on select or the transform tool. I'm going to make it as big as the artboard. You can use the corners here. Like that and make it as big, and we'll move it right next to our artboard and click on D. Coming back to the topic that I was talking about, that is the artboard preview. Now, if this was turned on, you cannot see anything outside this artboard. This is basically what is called artboard, the canvas or the white space. When you turn this off, you can see everything that is outside the artboard as well. Now we're going to make a very light sketch from this. If you're not really good at drawing. I would suggest that you keep the drawing right above here. You know what? Maybe we'll try that. Go to your image layer. You can see this tiny image icon here, click on your transform, and you can bring it back right here. Click on Dan, you can go to levels. Now we're going to reduce the layer opacity. This means how well can you see the layer and keep it at some level where you can actually see the artwork. Now, make sure you click on plus and create a new layer. And go to your pixel brush. By default, it's usually a pencil. If it's not, go to sketching, and then you can select pencil. You can slightly draw the thing right here. But if I suggest doing this, only if you're really not interested in drawing at all, because I personally don't like tracing from images unless it's something that I really have to because You know, I have to start drawing it some time or the other. Anyway, if you want, you can make the sun and then maybe make general the bigger clouds or something if you want, it's up to you. I'm going to remove the clouds because I want to do it myself. Maybe keep the sun. That's okay. Then once you have it, you can go and go back to your sketch layer, hit on levels, and increase the layer's opacity. Go back here and bring it right next to it. Click on time. Now let's go ahead and start painting. I'm going to go to the sketch layer, and again, reduce the opacity because I don't want it to be so strong. A 3. Sky Base Part 1 : Now it's time to stop painting. I will be using mostly pixel brushes for this illustration, particularly if I go into pixel brushes and then I go into painting, you can see this brushes called Canvas brush, Canvas brush flat and Canvas detail. These are the ones that I'll be using mostly. You can also go ahead and click on the star next to it so that it shows up under favorites. So when you click on favorites, it'll be right here and you don't have to go searching for it. You don't have to go into painting and then canvas and things like that, and it's super simple. Let's start off by painting the sky because that's the main thing over here. So I'm going to go on Canvas brush flat because that gives a very nice canvas texture. I'm going to quickly show you what the settings are over here in case you don't have it set already. And mine is at the basic default settings. You can just click on this button here to reset everything and it just resets everything. And then my flow, I would like to keep it a little higher about 70s or so. This one, I haven't touched it. It's at one, and the size is actually dependent on you, like what you are comfortable with. So I'm going to keep it a little higher maybe about this and let's try out. Yeah, it should be okay. Maybe 200 or something. Okay. That looks better, I guess. Because the higher you make it, it gets more and more pixelated and then it doesn't look that great. We're going to keep it around 200 to 300. You can also use this to slide up and down or click and hold, click and hold, and then you get this and you can type whatever you want. I'm going to keep it at 240 ish. You don't have to follow the exact same number, that is 2408 or something. You can just keep it somewhere around that number. Now, let's go ahead and paint the sky using the same colors in this photograph. I took this photo on an iPhone and you can see that it's a bit pixelated and it's not of great quality, but we do have some nice colors that are coming out of it. I'm going to start from this corner here, click and hold, and you can see that little I'm going to make it smaller so that you can see that. Click and hold, and you can see this little bubble pop up, and we're going to sellect one of those colors, and I will slowly paint that color over here. You sure this is dark? Oh, you know why this is light. Look here. We're still on the sketch layer. I'm going to undo it with my two finger tap. Again, click on a new layer, and now you see the dark color. That's perfect. We're going to go ahead and add the dark color. I don't want you to go crazy with the brush strokes. I don't want you to draw them like this. I would prefer that you draw it in this direction somewhat straight, and we're going to give some here and some here. We'll be using some mixing tools to mix them later. I'll show you how. I feel like this is a bit lighter, so I'm going to take that and I'm going to add a bit lighter here as well. This is pixel brushes, they work like acrylic, especially this brush. You can go ahead and choose colors and give it however you want. I have a bit of glare on my screen, so I'm not able to see it exactly, but I think I'm doing okay. Okay. As it comes towards this line, it gets lighter and you can see that. We're going to do just that and there's a bit of lighter color over here as well. You see how I'm just not bothering too much about exactly how it should be, so you don't have to do that as well. I'm going to add a bit more lighter shade over here because that's what it says a bit more light there. You can come back from down as well. Let's do this darker shade here like that, a bit lighter Make sure you don't pick the colors from the clouds, that's really important. We're going to give that color as well. It's very bright and nice and orange over here. We have to come back and fix this part later because you see around the sun, it's a very nice gradient color and we're going to give that later as well. Go to go pick more and make it a bit more like that. The more colors you pick, the better your artwork is going to be. I know it feels a little like cheating that you're actually picking colors from the photograph. But hey, at the end of the day, you do what you have to do to get the artwork ready, right? I'm going to put a round like this and I'm going to start off with the sun. I'll click and hold the sketch layer and bring it up like that so that I can see the sun where it is because I want some really yellowish color. I'm going to click and hold and pick that yellow. And try to put it on this layer itself and make it like that. I think it should be good. And don't worry too much about it. Make sure you don't have any white spaces, though, because that will bring out the white when we are using the smoothing tool. So I'm going to fix that. And you can pick up colors from here itself, if you want to match that like that, and, you know, just color it off like this. Ones as well. That looks good. Okay, so we have put in our colors for the sky, and now it's time to smoothen all out to make sure that it creates a seamless sky just like here. 4. Sky Base Part 2: All right. Now let's go ahead and smooth this thing out. You need to go into your smoothing brush. Go back in here click again so that you go into the proper brush, we'll go into painting, and we'll use the canvas brush flat again and then click outside, and now you have everything set to the same settings. That's amazing. Now you have to smoothen this. Again, you need to be careful about your brush strokes here. I don't want you to go up and down. And you see what happens. It creates this really weird strokes and we don't want that to finger to undo. I'm going to go ahead and try to mix this up. My strokes are going to be something like this. You can also use your finger. If you're using your finger, you should make sure there's one setting that is turned on here, your settings, app settings, and in here, you can go to input. Touch when apple pencil is at you, your finger will do this, and you need to say draw with brush. This is really important. Otherwise, your finger won't act as a brush. You can also do this and you see the finger smoothing comes out very different. I'm going to use it in the end when I really need to fix things out. I will just smoothen things out like this. And what happened there, I picked up some white and that's why it's like that. And then over here as well, try to smoothen it so that it looks a bit better. You can also increase this size to make it nicer, as you can see. Let's smoothen it. Can you use your brush, your finger, whatever suits you. And I'm going to come here. I'm going to smooth in it. You might wonder, isn't the color affecting this? No, it's not. The color is not affecting it as much as the direction in which you're going. If I use my brush from this darker color and move it in, it's going to drag the dark color. If I use my pencil from this lighter color and move it out, it's going to use that lighter color. So just look at what color needs to go in there and you're going to try and use that color to make sure it's blending properly. I want this a little brownish. I'm going to use that. One more thing to consider is the pressure with which you're doing this. Light pressure. I'll show you this. Light pressure gives you this really light texture thing. But if you use heavy pressure, then you see it's mixing like this. Depends on what you're doing over here and you can mix it like that, and make sure you lift up your pencil and bring it back in. Otherwise, things are going to get really messy. Here, I want to mix it in a circular motion up until a certain distance, and then I'm going to go ahead and mix it up like this. I know it doesn't look like the photograph right now, but that's okay. One thing you should know is, I am not so adamant or hell bend on recreating this photograph. I am using this as a reference image. So I want my art to look somewhat like this, but my clouds might not look exactly like that because I am not a artist who is really good at realism, but I like to create things on my own from the photographs. And sometimes I do achieve realism, but it's not always true, and it doesn't make me feel bad that my art does not look exactly like how it looks on the photograph. That's okay because everybody has their style and realism is not mine. It's completely okay. Don't pick up the white. Whatever here, it takes the white from the yard pot. Make sure you do that. I'm going to quickly check if everything looks okay. Obviously, the photograph is a bit grainy. I don't want that grain effect in my artwork. There's one more thing you should know, the smoothing tool. I know this is a color in the palette, so it looks purple and you feel like, it's not a big tail. But sometimes when you're not using any color which is closer to purple as well, sometimes these odd colors do show up when you're using the smoothing tool and you can do that and take it away if you want. But that's okay. Anyways, I want this really dark top, so I'm going to go ahead and click and select that. And I will just add I'm in the smoothing tool, go back to your brush and add it to the top a little bit because I think that setting the ski scene is really important. And I feel like this will look nicer. Okay. I think my overall sky, the base sky is ready. 5. Clouds Part 1: Okay. Let's go ahead and add some clouds to this. We see that there are a few major clouds like this one right here, very nice and grayish, and we're going to try adding that first. But I do want to add this on this screen right now. Mostly because clouds are something which takes a lot of work, you may not get it at the first try. I want you to draw it on a different layer. Can click on plus and create a new layer. We'll go back to our brush. Let's see if this size works, probably not. Let's make it a 200 is, we're going to go ahead and select the darker color here. And then, whenever I click, if you want the same color, you can see the HSP here and make a note of it, and then you can go here and click on HSB sliders, click and hold, and then you can type in here, and then you'll get your colors. And all the recent colors do come up here. And this, by the way, is the colors that were picked up from the photograph. You can use that as well, but it gets a bit tricky knowing where to put what. So that is why I've been picking colors from the photograph. And as you see, these are the colors we have picked already. So many colors, right? Okay. Go back, let's pick up this color. And I'm going to go ahead and try this out. Okay, this brush is not bad. It's okay. The size is fine. I'm going to add some of those. Now, I'll come back and choose something in between, this is the light, dark, so I'm going to choose that I'm going to add that as well. It's a bit brown, but that's okay, I guess. Then we'll choose the white one or the lightest one, and I'm going to add that in this way. I'm trying to mimic it as much as possible. But again, it's not always possible, so I'll just go ahead and add this This is okay, but I'm not too happy about it. So I'm going to just add a bit more. I'm using very light light what do you call it? Strokes like just touching, barely touching. I want them to mix here properly, and we won't be using smoothing tool for the clouds because I think it won't look that nice, if you do. We're going to try and fix it using a brush itself. And, it's still not that nice, so I'm going to try and use this color here. It's a bit orangish and try to add. Let's give a bit of pinkish here. You see that over there here, we're going to give that. And usually these things look much better when you scroll out and take a look at them. And obviously, the dark part, and I'm going to layer it a bit like that and a bit slightly slightly and somewhat over here. Yeah. I think that's okay. Maybe give a bit more whitter color and use this cloud at the edge of the cloud. It's a bit nicer and I'm going to try and give it here a little bit, not too much. A little bit and make it look like that. Does it look at least a little bit like that? I don't know. I'll use the middle one. That's why I told you that these things sometimes take forever and sometimes you get it at the first try. But like I said, it's okay. We're not aiming at realism and we'll be okay. Okay. And a bit of Okay. Now, if you move back and look at it, you should be able to see a very nice cloud. If you can see that, that's it, your job's done. I'm going to put a little bit here so that it looks good. Let me see. That is not bad. All right. Now let's move and draw the other clouds. 6. Clouds Part 2: And now it's time to add some clouds. So let's do that now. So I see that. There's a cloud over here in the corner, so we're going to go ahead and drop that now. I want you to take the outside color, like the lighter ones, so I'm just going to use a vector brush so that it creates a different layer and I can show it you. So this ops maybe white. So you see the shape is like this. Okay. It's an odd shape, and then there's this outer ring here, which is lighter in color. I want you to pick this outer ring color and draw first, so that's exactly what we're going to do right now and make sure you're on a separate layer other than the cloud. You want each cloud to be on a separate layer. Now, go back to your Canvas brush and I'm going to go into Canvas brush now because I want to have more details and it's much easier to control. If you feel you can't control your brush with this pick, go ahead and reduce it and make it as b small you want, do that, I guess. We'll obviously go to a new layer, and then we'll try to mimic it as much as possible. So I'm going to go ahead and select the outside that's the brown color. And then I will try to draw it as much as possible, exactly like that. Like this. Then like that. Make it small, going to make sure that the size is not too big. I'm going to increase this to about 100, I guess, and then I'm going to go ahead and choose the inside one and mark it. There you go. There you go. And that's it, I guess. This brown here. I'm going to quickly add that here a little bit of slides. And then take the dark again. I don't want you to spend too much time on this, but if you can, that's okay as well. Now, let's go ahead and make this one. So I'm going to go ahead and choose the color so brown and it's right above here. So I will go up then just give it randomly like this. And maybe make it a darker over here and take some darker color. Bit. Just a slightly. It's fine. No, it's not. You can use your eraser and erase it off. That's the beauty when you make it in a different layer so that you can just erase it off. So I'm going to go back and go here and go to my brush, reduce the size and raw this here. Choose some darker color and add a bit. That's a lot. That's it. And now let's make the other clouds plus. Let's go ahead and make these ones now. It's supposed to be super simple. Let's go ahead and use the canvas brush flat, and I'm going to keep it at a lower setting so that it's easier, click and select the color that you want, the lighter version of it, and we're going to try and mimic it like that, and round just make it like this. You can actually increase it because I want to make just a few strokes. I am not going to spend some time, a lot of time trying to fix this. Let's do dark again. Just like that. Like this. And there's one here. Like that. And then we have here or, like, booths, isn't it? And then we'll go ahead and choose a lighter brown. You can just click and hold and choose it as well. And I'm going to add some here like that. Just a little bit. And bit over here, making it look a bit better. I'm going to add a bit like that. I don't want too much here, so I'm going to go ahead and take that now and I'm going to add a bit to here because it's a bit darker, isn't it? We're going to add some here as well. So here as well. I think I'm going to stop it at that. You can always use your smoothing boh I think it needs a bit of smoothing up here because it looks a bit odd. Okay. There you go. And mix it up a little especially here as you can see. Okay. So now let's do this main cloud, plus and a different layer. I'm going to go into this cloud here and see the general size of it or the shape of it, go to the top. Now we know where your son is. I think my son should be here somewhere. It's a mood a little bit, but that's okay. Now we're going to go ahead and make that shape. Am I in the right layer smoothing, go to your brush, and make sure you have something like a boot structure here like that. And like this. And then we'll go and select the darker color. I'm going to use the strokes like this to put in some color because I feel like it's much better like that. I see that it's darker down. And then up and we'll use some really light brown as well because this one has, let's reduce this 44 or so, this is better. I'm going to add it on top of it. Obviously, there is some things here as well I'm add on top and I want to smooth it out a little bit. Smoothing it out is bigger brush. Okay, oops. I keep doing that for some reason. Then I'm going to go ahead and select this one and we'll go back to our brush and I have it at lower size, and we're going to go ahead and add some random bits here like that. And don't worry about too much. Let's go to Canvas brush. So that we get some smooth. I'll make it full Okay. I'm just going to quickly make the shape, but I'm not using any pressure, by the way. If I use pressure, then there's going to be a lot of color and we don't want that see I'm using really light strokes so that I try to get this shape. I'm not going to worry too much about the way it's turned out and stuff like that. I'll try to go ahead and fix this one a bit. I feel like it doesn't have the yellow that it actually needs the brown or whatever. I'll just go here, make it a little lighter, I guess. Let's try this. Is it too yellowish? No, it's okay. Yeah, that's much better. The side and add some browns, light brown. Like that. And I think we should be doing much better now. Oops not there. Go back to this. Add a bit of yellow light light light so that there's light reflecting over here. Okay, I think we have one here, so we're going to click and hold and go to that and create a new layer again. I go to make some clouds here. I think there's a lot of clouds, so let's just leave it at that. Now the clouds are ready and now it's time to move on to the sun. 7. Sun and Ocean: Okay. So now let's go ahead and make the sun, click on a new layer and you see the sun is bright white. I'm going to go ahead and click that. I will use canvas detail to make that. As you can see, the sun is a little away from our sketch. I'm going to go ahead and draw it right here in the center like this. White one. You also see there's a tiny moon here, so we'll just go here and draw a tiny moon. That's good. Now we have to put in the bright light around. I'm going to go ahead and select that white ish color, lightly added. Now, go back into Canvas brush and then add it a little bit more. Reduce the size obviously, no. I'll do that as well. Then I'll add this here and a bit of orange so that it mixes, I'll go to my smoothing tool and I'll try to blend in like that. I'll bring in the orange as well, and I'll try to blend in. And go round and round and round. Make sure you bring the sun layer below the big cloud, so it doesn't affect it so much. A sun is okay. You can make it more oranges or anything, it's up to you. Now, let's go ahead and make the ocean. Now let's go it to the top layer and click on plus now we'll make the ocean. See the ocean color is somewhat like this. Pick any color that you want, go back to your canvas brush, flat and we'll try to increase it a little bit and then just draw ocean using that color. And I'm going to go choose other colors as well, that's a brown. That's okay. And we're going to go ahead and add those colors. It's a bluish tint here, click and hold and go up, and we're going to use that as well. And I'm not going to create the exact same scene as that. I'm just going to go ahead and draw this. Now I need to put this nice little shiny thing, so I'm going to go ahead and click and choose the brightest yellow that I can find. Then right below the sun, you need to do this. Plus a new layer and a clipping mask. Then a little bit here. Add some like this. It's a bit more here, and we'll take some orange here. And let's add some here as well, a little bit of orange. And that's good. Now, let's go to a smoothing tool and I'm going to go ahead and mix it in a little bit. Bring the brown inside. I know we are on a clipping mask, but it's going to take the things from the background. It's going to bring in like this. Now, let's do that. You can make it even more brighter if you want. Go ahead and do that. That's okay. I'm just trying to keep it as simple as possible over here. Then you can also choose really dark. Yellow, go back and touch up a little bit so that you'll give it more yellow. I'm going to use the sun color and see if that'll work. That's too white. So we're going to go ahead and try this itself. That's good. We'll make sure we mix it up as well. Then I want to go ahead and choose the darker color here. You see some are dark with the waves. Go ahead and choose that and I'll go back into Canvas brush. It's usually when it's very tiny. I'm going to add a bit of dark wave here like that. It's, I'm going to add very lightly, like that. Just a few of them, and also go ahead and add here if you want to. But we're going to keep it at minimum because I don't want to mess up the ocean because we're not going to keep it all blue. Why? Is this not blue? Okay? Let's see if this is color. Yeah. That's the color I want, right? So I'm going to go here, got to Canvas brush flat and try to make it that color, it's nice blue that I have. There you go. Now I want a thin layer on top. You see this horizon. This is darker than this because it's a little brighter there. We're going to go ahead and choose that particular color and make it darker and go back to the layer, which has the background for the sea. Go back cross and in here, we're going to go ahead and give you one thin dark layer right behind the horizon horizon like this. I think it needs to be darker, so I'm going to go ahead and choose the bluer version and bring it down a notch and do that and make it really dark horizon like that. There you go. If you want, you can see some ships and stuff. You can go ahead and do that, but I'm just going to skip that part completely and go ahead and do the sand now. 8. Final Touches: It's time to make the sand. Let's just go ahead and do that. We'll go on top of these layers. Click on plus, click and select to choose some color. You have that. Go to your canvas brush flat, make sure it's a little bigger, and we're just going to color it bigger. Let's choose the slighter color here. I'm going to add that as well. Oh, they look like same, isn't it? Maybe add the darker one, and then. So we're just going to add that lighter color. And I'm going to make sure I cover till the sand that the sketch. I hope you can see that and cover it up nicely. There you go, all good. And you can obviously choose this dark one here and I'll go into Canvas brush. I'm not going to add a lot of details here, but obviously, I'm going to try and do minimum as minimum as I could. There's a track So you can do that here as well. I can increase this. I think I'm going to use the canvas brush flat. That looks better. Yeah, of course. Add some here. Like that. Can add a bit of brown stuff here and there. Like that. Okay. Add a bit darker here. Okay. That's it. Now let's add the black outline or silhouette of these people. So I'm going to go here, go into your canvas brush and make sure it's as tiny as you can control, and let's select that really dark let's go ahead and make this. Now, this one, I want to bring it back to a higher opacity so that I can see the skyline properly, go into a new layer for sure, let's fill it in. And if you cannot fill the people, that's okay. We'll use a tiny brush. You can also go into a lot of other brushes, by the way. It's going to all in painting. You can go to blade or something and try to fill it in as well. I'm going to undo this, and I'm going to fill it in. I'll increase the size so that this is nice and dark. And obviously, we need to make the tree. This looks like a dog instead of a person, but that's okay. Okay, I think our tree is good as well. Now, check the sketch, and you can see your complete painting. And once you're done, you can go back and hide that, go here. And it goes back like this, so I'm going to flip it. And once you're ready, You can click on Share, publish an Export and Export as and you can select JP whatever you want and export it onto your device. You can also click publish an Export and Taxpot then you can actually see the timeline or time lapse of this document. You can see how you were drawing everything, if you want to edit your artwork or if you want to learn from it, then you'll know how to do that and it shows up very nicely. Obviously, it's going to export in this format, but you can always go ahead and take it out in whatever format you want. Click and done done. Then That's it. That's the end of this class and I hope you liked it. I hope you create some wonderful wonderful skies as well. I've collected some sky reference images for you guys, and I will put it in a folder and share a link with you. I hope you go ahead and try those skies as well, and you create your own and share it here with me. I'm also on Instagram, so you can find me on print me some color where I actually paint with traditional media. I also do tutorials on YouTube. I really hope you create many more skies and always, when you're drawing, don't get demotivated when you look at it close by. Always keep it away from your eyes and see how it looks because most of the time, they look stunning when you're not close to him. Anyway, I hope you have fun and I'll see you in the next class. Bye bye.