Painting Oranges with Oil Brushes in Adobe Fresco

1. Welcome: Hi. I'm Ashwini, and welcome back to another Skillshare class. This time, we're going to be painting some oranges with oil brushes in Adobe Fresco. In my previous classes, we learned how to work with vector brushes, pixel brushes, and even watercolor brushes. But this time, we are diving into Fresco's oil paint brushes to create rich, textured and realistic paintings. I'll guide you step by step as we paint some super juicy oranges from the first sketch all the way to that perfect glossy finish. You learn how to blend, layer, and build up color just like traditional oils. This class is absolutely beginner friendly. All you need is Adobe Fresco, a stylus such as Apple pencil and your creativity. I'll show you how to control your brushes, create depth with light and shadow, and make your painting come alive. By the end, you'll have your own vibrant orange painting and the skills to use Fresco's oil brushes for anything you imagine. Think fruits, still life, portraits. The possibilities are endless. So grab your tablet, open up Fresco, and let's start painting together. I can't wait to see your amazing paintings in the projects gallery. Let's make something colorful, textured, and totally beautiful together. 2. New UI Update: So as of May 2026, Fresco has changed its UI. That means it might look a little different than what you see in the next few lessons. I thought I'll make a update video for my Fresco classes. So here you go. As soon as you come in, if I click on Home, this is how it looks like. Used to see your custom sizes and stuff over here, but now it looks something like this, but that's okay. You can click on Create New and create a new document as usual, click on your files, and this is how the homepage looks like. Create new. You have an extra bit here called the social. You have some social media templates there, so you can use that. I'll just go to digital and current screen size. The first thing you notice as soon as we move here is that the toolbar has completely moved from left hand side to top. I know I'm not too happy about this, but yeah, we'll just work with it, I guess. On the left side now you have the brush settings. So this is the smoothing which used to, this is the smoothing, you go up and down. This is basically the flow or the opacity of the brush, like if you have some charcoal pencil and then yeah let's make it black, and then you do this. This is like you keep it all high, and then if you keep it all low, you see it's not flowing so well. This is the flow of the brush, and this is basically the size of the brush that you have. Again, click and hole and everything else works exactly the same. The settings are almost the same as well. I don't think we need to worry about that. And on the top bar, you have all the other tools that you used to have. This one is pose. It is a new thing which is not covered in any of my tutorials, so I'm not going to go into that. But basically, you have everything in here, the last tool, everything's up here. The shapes are still here. Text is again here, and then this is to add your images or photos and things like that. The eyedropper tool is here and the color palette is over here. You might see that the undo buttons have moved here instead of here, but that's fine because your two fingertaps still work. Also one thing is when you click on something else other than the brush, this panel disappears. They used to be your animation or motion panel here, which has moved up and they used to be shapes like a ruler and stuff and that has moved into this bit here or drawing aids. That's what it is, and you have all the drawing aids over here. Then you have your symmetry here and the perspective grid and the grids. When you turn it on, you can have grids and snapping is here, so you snap everything, I guess. Apart from that, everything else is exactly the same. And when you go up, you get a full screen mode. The only disadvantage I've seen is that when you're on the brush mode, before even if you were in the full screen mode and drawing, your brush, this was a floating thing which you can move everywhere anywhere you wanted, but they have disabled that. That means when you go to full screen mode, your brush settings disappear. So if you want to go back and adjust your brush size or something, you have to go back in, which I think is not a good thing. The motion settings are still here, so that hasn't changed as well. And the most important thing that I want to include is the brushes. Instead of having three separate brushes, they merge them into one single brush. This was done a while ago when you click on brush, you need to go to all brushes, and then you can choose what brushes that you want, pixel brushes, and then you can see all the subheadings or whatever. All the brushes are here, but only thing is it's all bundled up together and that's the most annoying bit for me at least. I guess that's it. That's the main change to the UI, and since this was a significant change, I thought I will add a updated video. I hope you go ahead and enjoy the next lesson. 3. Setting up: Okay, so let's begin by setting up our artboard and learning a bit about the oil paint brushes. Click on Create New. Go to digital and current screen size. You might have noticed that my iPad is in the landscape mode. That's why this shows up in the landscape mode. If you want to change it into portrait mode, click on this tiny arrow and switch to portrait. I'm just going to click on the current screen size. Let's bring in the most important thing that is the texture. You can find the texture in the resources stab, so go ahead and download it. Once you download it, it gets saved in your files or photos. For me, it's in my files, so I'm going to go ahead and get it. Click here, click on Files. I'm going to use the canvas texture. This might take some time to load because the file is quite huge, but don't worry. And then use the corners here to extend this beyond the artboard. Artboard is nothing but the white area here where your drawing is going to show up. Extend it, and click on D. So there's one setting here that's called artboard Preview. If I turn it off, you can see the extra bits that's outside the artboard. So make sure you turn it on all the time so that you know where your artboard ends. Because when you export it, only the thing which is on the artboard shows up in your artwork or the final image. And this thing here is for touch shortcut, this thing. You can keep it off if you want. But I like to keep it on because sometimes I like to experiment with certain settings with oil paintbrushes with this. Okay, so let's set this up. So click here and click on multiply. So whatever we draw beneath this is going to have the amazing texture on it. If we don't choose it as multiply, is just not going to show up. So click here. And you can reduce the opacity if you don't want the texture to be so obvious. There you go. But I'm going to keep it at 100 and see where it goes. Maybe I'll change it later on. Click here to go back. Perfect. Now let's go ahead and experiment with our oil paint brushes. So as you might know, these are the pig and brushes. These are the live brushes where you have watercolor and oil, and this is the vector brushes. But we're going to go here and click on our oil brushes, and I'm going to choose oil paint chunky for this titoria. There you go. Now, this one, I want to increase it to around 600. That's really big. You don't have to keep it at exactly 636. Click and hold, and you can also type in here. What I mean 636 is around 600 should be okay. Then my flow is set at 68. I'm going to keep it at around 50s and this is the paint mix, which is at 50. So I'm going to keep it at 50. So what this means is, let's do a little bit of example here. I'm going to choose some yellow, and I'm going to mark it here and let's choose some blue. Why not? And I'm going to put it here. So now I have blue on my brush, so I'm going to mix it, and it's going to create this nice green color. Now, this is at 50, right? So I'll undo that. I'm going to change this all the way to zero. B one, very low. I'm going to try and mix it, but you see the blue is it has an upper hand. You don't see so much of yellow, but you see more of blue, so it's not mixing that well. If I had yellow, and then it would be too much yellow. You see it doesn't mix well, I I keep it all the way up, I'm going to choose blue now. I try to mix it. The blue doesn't get as much importance as it would if it was at, you know, a zero. So this basically means how well your color that is already on the palette is going to mix with the color that you have on the brush. So, ideally, it's better to be at 50 unless you have certain plants. So I'm going to two finger tap to undo that. And there's one more setting that you want to make sure you have one is canvas texture. I like to keep it at canvas texture so that the brush itself has some texture. Another thing is reload color. Make sure it's turned on. So if this is turned off and you're drawing Oh, sorry, it's turned off. Okay, let me turn it on. And I'm going to make blue. I'm going to make yellow. And now if I mix it, this is the color that forms. But when I lift my brush up and paint, it's going to show yellow. That's the color that you've picked, right? So now if we undo that. Manto. I'll go back here and turn this off. And now if I mix it, ta, I lift it, and I try to draw again. It's not going to pick this color, but it's going to pick the color that was formed by mixing. So obviously, if you'm working on a piece where you need mixing your own colors, then go ahead. Keep this off and it'll work perfectly fine for you. But for me, for this tutorial, I need it on so that I have separate colors. Alright, so the next bit is when we are drawing this artwork, we're going to make sure that we draw everything below the texture layer. So as you can see, right now, this part, these things that I've drawn is above the texture layer. So this canvas texture isn't coming through, right? So if I click and hold and bring it below this and drop it in, you see it has the canvas texture. And this is what we want for our artwork. So go ahead and make sure that you draw everything below the canvas texture. So now that we have a little bit of information about the pane brushes and setting up your artboard, let's start drawing. 4. Let's Paint: Okay, so now that we are done, I'm going to use my two fingers, tap to undo things, or you can also click and clear layer and go to a layer below the texture layer. If you don't have a layer here, just go back to this bottom layer and click Plus and you'll have an A layer. So we're going to go ahead and draw an orange right now. And for that, I'm going to choose some colors. Can click on your color palette and let me just do this so that you can see it better. The outer ring is actually the color, and this one tells you the hues, you know. So I'm going to go ahead and go to orange and make sure this goes all the way up to this corner because that gives you the brightest and the best color. So I'm going to drop it down to make it slightly orange, a light orange. If you want the exact same colors, click on this HSB slider. Click and hold, and you get the type in whatever you want. Oops. Let's make it 45 as it was. Perfect. And we are still at oil pate chunky, and I'm around 600. So we're going to draw a sheep, orange shape like that. I want you to put in the top part of an orange, keep the bottom part as it is. So if you're not very sure about drawing an orange like brown, don't worry about the edges. It doesn't matter. I don't care about it right now, so you don't have to care much about it, as well. And by the way, if you feel this brush size is big, you can go ahead and reduce it. Use the brush size that's comfortable for you. That's really, really important when you're drawing with these kinds of brushes because I might be comfortable with a really large brush because I have been practicing with it, but you might not. So just the brush size to meet whatever size that you're comfortable with. See, I've kept it at 3:37 because I felt the edges weren't getting, you know, that great. So you can be on the same layer, and I'm going to co hat and bring this down to make it red. Like bright red. I love this one. Or maybe make Okay, this one. That's 400 and hundred. And I'm going to go ahead and add it here, and I think this would be better if it's a bit bigger 472. And again, I'm going to make it round over here. And I'm not lifting my brush right now. Have you noticed it? That's because when I'm doing this, if I lift, a huge block of red is going to come over. And I don't want that. I want this nice orange to mix with the red. I can lift it up now and add a bit more color, lift, and now you'll get more color. So when you want to add the color that's already on your brush, then you lift your brush up. Otherwise, it's just going to work with the color that you create, and that's amazing as well. Okay, so I think we have formed a bottom part of the orange. So you don't have to make it exactly red like this. Use a little bit of brownish or maybe a little darker orange that works as well. So now let's give some highlights. So for this one, I'm going to go to a different layer just to show you guys. I'm going to imagine my light source is here. So, obviously, the dark part is going to be here. This the shadow, opposite of the light, right? This part, this whole part is going to be the shadow part. Let's go back to our orange. And I'm going to go ahead and pick white. Go back to your brush, and let's put here, like, exactly where your light sources. We're going to put some white. And for this, I'm putting a bit of pressure, and then as I move, I'm going to reduce the pressure. So what I mean is let me take some color which you have used recently, blue, maybe. Use a different layer so it doesn't mix with the orange. And then I'm going to put up pressure, and then in the edges, I'm going to use light pressure. So you see it mixes because there's no other color around here, so it looks weird. But if you have some other color in the background, then it nicely blends, I'll that. I'll go back, pick my white. You can reduce the size again if you're not comfortable. I'm going to go ahead and mix it a little bit. I'm going to undo that because I want to start here with bright and slowly mix it around so that it blends in a little bit. There you go. You feel, no, no, no. Okay. And there you go. That's perfect. That's a nice little color as well. Now, click on plus, and we're going to go into a green. Again, you can take any green that you want, move this and move this around, bring it back down. If you want the exact same color, it's 92 85, 69. Maybe a bit darker. Okay. And this, I'm going to go into oil paint detail because it's a bit fine details that you need to add. So we're going to just go into a different layer because we don't want to mix it with this one, okay? And you can add this anywhere you want, maybe. Add it here, I guess. Then like that. So I'm gonna hide this demonstration or extra things that I put. This looks wonderful. So we're going to go ahead and add more oranges now, but in different layers. So let's get to that. 5. Paint some more!: All right. So now that we have this orange, I want to add more. But obviously, this is in the center, and I want to move it a little bit to the left. So how can we do that? Go back to the orange, the main one, and click on these three dots here and click on select multiple. And we're going to select the stock as well and use this fold icon for grouping them together. And now, if I click on the transform button, I can move it anywhere I want. And I'm going to go ahead and place it here a little bit. If you want, you can decrease the size. And turn it around, do whatever you want. Click on done. So we're going to go ahead and draw one more of this orange over here or somewhere. You can also go ahead and duplicate this and a great thing to do, but I want to draw it. So I'm going to go ahead and quickly draw one more right next to it. I Okay, so I've grouped them as well. So we have two oranges ready, and now it's time to draw on next batch. So I'm going to go back I'll move this sky here. I'll go back all the way down and click on plus because I'm going to be drawing my oranges here. If you feel like these oranges are distraction, you can always go ahead and hide it, which is a very good thing to do when you are a complete beginner. But if you want to know where these oranges need to come, so yeah, you can draw the base and then continue, I guess. So I'm going to go into my orange again and then change the brush to hanky. And then I'm going to draw here. Not there here, in the background. And now that I know, I'm going to hide these two, go back here and draw my orange in the same way like before. This time, I'm going to mix it nicely, and I want more orange bits, so I'm going to get more orange and make it more orange here. Like that. Perfect. And then you can add highlights, but we're going to skip on the highlights for now. We'll just add the stock. Plus, now I'll bring these two because I want to see where I want to add my stock. Sometimes you don't need to add stock because it's hidden, but sometimes you want to. So I'm going to add this here on a new layer. Don't forget that. Perfect. I want to add one here as well. I can just copy this. Duplicate layer and I'm going to transform and bring it up here and I'm going to reduce the size a little bit. Let's make a tiny orange hobby. There you go. You can also go ahead and copy one of these, click on Done. Now click Duplicate Layer group, and then we're going to go ahead and transform. Going to bring one up here and I'm going to make it like that. You can choose to do it however you want. Make it a bit slightly bigger because it doesn't look exactly like that one. And then done. Continue because it's going to be going outside. That's fine. Continue. All right. And then I feel like this one, the stock. I want the light orange to be on top, so I'm going to go here to the one, this one, click on transform. I'm rotating it so that the light color comes here maybe move it. Done. Continue. See how easy that is super easy. And then we're going to do something else, and that is adding some shadows because do you see that the oranges are blending and you don't know where this orange ends and where this starts. So we're going to go ahead and fix that right now. So I will group the one with the stock together, these two so that we don't get confused. Alright, let's go to this orange here. Was it this one? You can use the i button to figure out which one. What you can also do is make sure all the ones in that layer are together, so it's easier. Let's get in here. Let's go to this. And now we're going to go ahead and click and use that orange color, and we're going to bring it slightly down to make it slightly darker, not too much. 4599 and 82 should be alright. We're going to add it here. Oops. Is it the same color? Yeah, I guess. Min make is a bit darker and maybe bit this as well. And when you're doing that, make sure you lift your pen up a little bit when you're at the edges, especially, reduce the size, like that. And then you can just roll it out so that it mixes. There you go, and you can see that color change. Between the two oranges, right? So we're going to go ahead and do that for this one here, that is this one. So go in, get in there. You can also use a clipping mask, but I prefer doing it this way so that the color blends nicely like this. You can also use red and darken it up. This works wonders as well as you can see. It really depends on what colour shadow you want to give. You can go ahead and change this too, but that's okay. So oranges are slightly different in colour, and we want to give them here as well. Any overlapping stuff needs to get colored like this. And sums ups because I didn't want to fix that. Okay. There you go. All good. I'm going to add a bit of orange to this part here. Want this to be lighter slightly. Not too much. Let's do the same over here. So I want you to go there, that one, choose the reddish, red that you choose. And then add a bit like that. Alright. That looks fine. And we're going to add more now in the background. So I want you to go below all that and click plus, and we're going to add a couple of more here and here. Let me quickly do that. As you can see, I just used orange for the most bits. And then I'm going to add a bit of reddish highlights everywhere, not making it too much right now. And then adding a bit here. And we're going to go ahead and choose the dark red we have and bring it even further because we're going to add shadows to these dark bits here. Do you see that? So we have to add shadows to that, and we have to have a different kind of shadow, by the way, so we're just going to do that. These oranges are in the background, so they're going to be much darker. Can increase the size to help you in blending, because the bigger the size it blends really well. So it looks much nicer. Okay, that looks good. And now in the end in the background, I'm going to go back and plus. I'm going to add this. No, that's not nice. That's really not nice. So probably I'll take some of that brown that we chose, and I'm going to add it everywhere, and I'll come back with red so that it'll mix in nicely, alright? There you go, and then I'm going to choose that darker red, and I'm going to add it just to where all the oranges are like that. And that looks better now. It might look too orangy, but you can also choose Black, by the way. Why not? Yeah. But don't press the black too much because then it'll create that really dark tone that you don't want. Okay. So now let's go ahead and add some highlights now because I feel like it is too, it's not exactly looking like oranges. Alright? 6. Highlights and Shadows: Okay, it's time to add highlights, and we're going to go ahead and choose white. And I still am on my chunky brush. I'll reduce it a little bit, maybe 300 ish. And we're going to add some highlights. This one will definitely need it. So I'm going to go ahead into that layer. Now I have to figure out where that is. So this one. Yep. So I'll go there, and I'm going to add a bit of highlight here. And probably this one. Oh, that's on a different layer. That's why. So we're going to go into that and add a bit here as well. Slight mago. And this one doesn't need. And this one might be. Okay. It's in this own layer, so I'm just going to add it here. If you feel like you need more oranges in here and stuff, you can go ahead and do that as well. I'm going to add a bit of stock to some of these because I feel like they might do, well, with the stock, I'm going to go into detail, but now the green, I'm going to make it a bit darker if it's going to be in the background, right? So plus going to add like that. Maybe. That's not supposed to be in that, but it's okay. We'll just add it. Okay. Yes, that's fine. You can add a bit of this reddish shadow in here. So I'm going to go here, this one, and double click. Go into this and add a bit shadow. I want it to be a bit darker, 'cause I feel like it'll look much better if it's a bit darker. Let me undo that detail brush setting that I did. Okay. There you go. Definitely, I think it looks a bit better. And even this one mix it up a little bit. Blend, blend, blend. That looks okay. But I want to add more stuff. I want to add a bit more oranges. How about that? Plus steak orange in the background. Should be here. Yep, there go. And obviously, we're going to add colors. We want the darker one. This is optional. By the way, you don't really need to add these things, but add some if you feel like. Okay. There you go. Your plate of oranges is ready. But in the next lesson, I'm going to teach you a trick where you can clip it to a certain shape that you want. Let's do that. 7. Clipping to Shape: Okay, so now your orange is ready and you can export it like this, by the way, but I'll show you another way in which you can clip it to any shape you want. So I'm going to go into my layers here and I'm going to group all the oranges together. You know what I mean? Don't include the background layer, but everything else. Select, click, select multiple and choose everything that makes up these oranges. Not the texture. Click on folder. If you want to just quickly check, use your eye button to hide it. And by the way, if you take out the texture, you can look at your orange, what you have done. It looks good too. So it's up to you, texture or no texture. Okay, so now, once you have this, click on plus and create a new layer, and we'll go into chunky and I'm going to select a big brush, maybe 900 or something like that. And I'm going to quickly, not completely draw so that it doesn't cover the entire artboard, but it does cover some of it like that. You can use any other brush if you want. And you see I'm letting the texture show up in the end. Like that. And I can make this darker so that it looks nicer here. But I'm going to keep the textures in the end. So once I'm done with that, I'm going to go back here, click and hold, and you can move it. Use the thing because it's a group, you can't do a clipping mask. That's one more thing. So we'll click and duplicate this layer. And I'm going to hide this. Now, this is my backup. If I want to make any changes, I can go back into the groups. It's easy to go back into groups. You just double click to get inside. So I'm going to keep it. And this one click and say merge layers in group. So now this is one painting. You can't do any modification. There are no layers in here. So now, I'll click and go back. I should have used the other one, it doesn't matter, and click on clipping mask. And this is going to show up with this texture. You can make the same thing here as well. You can edit this, like use your eraser, make it big and then, you know, erase this off because we're going to put texture and then you can bring the pattern however you want, like that. See what I'm doing? And you have your artwork on this particular sheet. That's it. I'm going to erase this. I'm going to that. And you see here. Now, this is what your artwork is going to be if you export this as a as something without a background or a texture. If you hide both background and texture, what happens is you get this checkerboard, that means that it's going to export as something without a background. But let's bring it in. That's what is this. Oh, okay. Let's bring in the texture and maybe reduce the texture a little bit because then it's nice and bright. And there you go. You have your final artwork ready. And in the next lesson, we're going to export it. 8. Export and Save: All right, so it's time to export this. Click on She, publish and export, Export As. If you're going to be exploring this with the background and the texture, you don't have to worry anything. You can export it as a JPEG as well. Click on Export and save it onto device or anywhere that you want. But if you want to export this without a background and without the texture, you have to always select it as a PNG and make sure you remove the background and the texture before coming to this stage. P it. Click on You can also watch the T labs preview, click here, preview Time labs, and it's going to show you everything that you've done so far from the beginning till the end. You can export that as well by clicking on this button here. I'm going to go ahead and uncheck this. And that's it. That brings us to the end of this pericular class. And I hope you enjoyed creating something with oil paint brushes and hope it gives you some confidence to create more art with this absolutely amazing brush. And I would love to see what else you can create. You can go out and experiment the same way with apples, pears, blueberries, one of my favorites, by the way, and the easiest to drop. So go out onto that. I'll see you in the next class. 9. Class Project: So the class project is going to be super simple. I want you to use Adobe frescos oil paint brushes to draw something. Even if you want to draw a single orange, that's fine. Go ahead and do that and upload it to the projects section here. Otherwise, draw the entire thing, and that's fine, too. You can also experiment with other fruits, anything that you wish to create. Okay, I'm excited to see what you guys create then.