Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey. I'm Maya Favor. In this class, I will teach you how to sketch and draw motifs for your patterns in Adobe Fresco. As a surface pattern designer, with a minimalistic and imaginary style, I create my patterns out of vector drawings. I sketch and draw on my iPad and create the final repeats in Illustrator. In this class, we will use Adobe Fresco, which is a new exciting iPad app with a bunch of features to explore. One of the amazing features that Fresco offers is that you can draw both in pixel and vector in the same document but to keep it simple and don't make the learning code to steep, we will focus on learning the vector drawing features, which makes it easy to later turn your drawings straight into patterns in Adobe Illustrator. I'll show you how I get inspiration and sketch ideas for patterns and my digital joined techniques. We will start with going through the basic tools and gestures of Fresco but we'll focus mostly on learning by doing so I'll show you more tips and tricks along the way as we create. You will learn my techniques for a smooth and easy workflow and how to start to visualize the repeat pattern in this early stage of the pattern making process. If you're interested in learning a fun and easy way of vector drawing, then this class is for you. We will focus on drawing motifs for repeat patterns but you can of course, use the same techniques to create stand lone illustrations as well. All you need to get started is an iPad and Adobe Fresco.
2. Class Project: Your project in this class is to draw motives in Adobe Fresco that you later on can turn into a pattern. The purpose is to learn a smooth and easy workflow and how to use Adobe Fresco to draw vector motives. In this class, we won't make a final pattern of your motives, if you're interested in learning how I create patterns in Adobe Illustrator, have a look at my class From Sketch to Repeat Pattern here on Skillshare. As I recently got these cute little plants, I will draw plants as motives in this class. It's not a must to draw plants, you can of course choose other objects to draw, but it will be awesome to see your interpretation and your unique style of drawing plants. If you feel like it, you're more than welcome to join in on the plant theme. I'm really excited to see what you create.
3. Colors: Let's talk a little bit about colors. So when I start to draw, I usually have a color palette to start with. That doesn't need to be my final color palette. I can change it during the process. But for me, shapes and colors are equally important to get a good vibe of what I draw, which makes me move forward in my drawing process. So it's all about the good vibe. So to make a color palette, you can do that in several ways. I have a whole class about mastering colors in pattern design here on skill share where I teach you my techniques on choosing color palettes, where I get color inspiration, how to discover your color style and work with colourways and patterns. You can check that out to learn more about that. But in this class I'm just going to run through really quickly how you could pick a color palette to start with. One way is to grab a color palette with inspiration from Pinterest. If you swipe up, you will get your doc menu. If you press hold on Pinterest, you can drag it and release it and you will get a split window on your iPad. So on Pinterest, I have a board that is called color, where I save pins that is inspiring to me with the colors. So what I'm going to draw today with the plants, I want something like this. You could get inspiration from images that you save on Pinterest. Usually, I don't pick colors directly from the images, but I use them as inspiration to choose colors. You can have that here on the right, the image, and you can use your color wheel to pick colors that matches the feeling that you're after. I always draw with pink. I'm going to choose vector brushed the basic ground, adjust the size, and select the pink color. This is normally simple way of making my color palettes, I do little blobs of color, and maybe I want to have some green. That was a little bit too forest green, maybe a little bit more blue green, then I can use the fill tool to fill it with a different green. So you could also use the HSB sliders. I think I want some mustard brown, maybe a little bit more orange, or something like that. Pick the vector brush and just draw a little blob. Your colors will be saved to the little area, recent colors. You can also save new colors to this little area. Here is where I build my palette. So you're welcome to look at my color board on Pinterest, or of course, your own color inspiration if you want to pick a color palette this way. To remove the Pinterest window, press hold and drag, and then press hold and slide it through right. So I will erase this pellet as I have another way of fetching my color palette, and that is to place an image that I saved in my desktop, where I have a pellet that I've been using lately that I really like and that has this earthly colors that I want for this drawings that I'm doing today. So to fetch this palette, we will save it in the recent area, and I can just hold to grab the color and save it to recent area. Then I pick the next color, type recent, and the next and tap the little plus, until I have fetched all of the colors in my palette. I also want to fetch this background color. That's it. Now, we have our palette here. You can access white. I think we will use white. I'm just going to save it to my palette and select the color tool, and then I usually save my palette on a separate layer at the bottom so that I always can go back to it later on. As I said, if you want more inspiration on how to find a color palette that you like, you can check out my class, mastering colors impeller design here on skillshare. When you have chosen a color palette, we can move on to the next lesson, where we'll talk about how to find inspiration for our motifs and how to sketch them in Adobe Fresco.
4. Inspiration and Sketching: Let's get some inspiration, there are of course, many ways you can get inspiration, one of them is Pinterest, so you can just swipe up to access your doc menu and tap Pinterest, I have a board that's called flowers, plants and nature, if you're going to draw plants like me in this class and you're more than welcome to have a look at it and get inspired by the plants that I have saved on this board, so there are some routinized cacti here and also one of my favorite ones is this one, I also recently bought these cute little plants, and they are actually the reason why I will drop plants in this class because I just think they're so cute, this is some coffee plant and yeah, I have a bunch of inspiration here and I also have interests. I will get inspiration from both of these sources, and my plan is to draw maybe four or five different plants. When you gather some inspiration, I will have a look at both these images and my cute little plants, we will start with the sketching part and I'm just going to move my iPad because we will start with sketching by hand. In this class, we will both sketch by hand and then trace our image in fresco and we will also sketch directly in fresco. I will show you both techniques. We start with sketching by hand. Just grab a piece of paper or your notebook and then just start sketching. When you have made some sketches by hand, we can move on to try out to sketch the iPad in Adobe fresco, so let's head back to fresco to do some digital sketching and I'll just hide this layer with the color palette by holding down my touched shortcut and double tap the layer. To sketch in fresco, I used the pixel brush, that's called pencil, is under sketching in the pixel brush menu. I adjust the size and just choose a black color, and I think I would try out. This, maybe something like that, the smoothing I will keep in the middle I think and the rest of the brush settings I want to adjust for this sketching part., so as you might have seen, as I started to draw with a pixel brush, fresco added a new layer for me. This is the little symbol for the pixel layer, little dots, image layer has little image on them, and vector layer has a circle. Now when we have our pixel layer and our pencil selected, let's sketch up some plants, for inspiration, I have my cute little plants here around me but I also can drag up the Pinterest we know to get some inspiration. For this I, think that I want to sketch. I'll just use this one and then I will just start to sketch. You will get a different stroke with the pencil if you tilt your brush or if you use tip, I think I want to have a plot that looks something like this, Zoom out a bit and move my pot a little bit to the center and here's a nice feature. If you hold down a touch shortcut, you will get a constrained position when you move your object. I'll just sketch up some branches, maybe something like that, and large leaves. Maybe something like this is just a quick little sketch, as you can see, I'm just using this for inspiration and also the plans that I have here on my desk, so now I made a really rough sketch with the pencil, so if you have your hand drawn sketch now and also a digital sketch, we can move on to the next lesson, where I will show you how to draw the final piece with the vector brushes.
5. Draw Motives 1: Let's make a new layer and start to draw with the vector brush. Just tap the New layer and I'll hold and drag that layer on top of my sketch layer. I'll pick a color to start with and I think I'll go for this orange one from my saved palettes and the vector brush. You have five different vector brushes to choose from and then you can arrange the brush settings. I usually just go for the basic round 1. You can adjust the size, try out the size of it. That might be good. For the smoothing, I think I'll go for something in the middle and the brush settings, normally I just keep these as they are, the roundness, the angle and the taper. What I change is the pressure dynamics. I usually go for around 30 percent in pressure dynamics which basically means that if I press my Apple Pencil down, I will get a thicker brush stroke. For the velocity dynamics, I usually keep off. With the velocity dynamics, the brush thickness is affected by the quickness of your stroke. I'll just remove those strokes, turn off the velocity dynamics because I'm not really fond of that one and then let's start to drop. As you can see now, when I have my vector brush picked and a new layer, this layer is still empty. It hasn't been selected a pixel layer or a vector layer or an image layer. But as soon as I start to draw with my brush, as it's a vector brush, it will be a vector layer. I'm just going to draw my parts really quickly. I will use the fill tool to fill it in. To see the shape clearly, I can turn off the sketch layer by holding down the touch short cut and double tap on sketch layer. This is a rough shape so maybe you want to fix the edges a bit and then you can use the erase tool. Either you can pick the erase tool, adjust the size, and make sure that you're on the right layer and erase. You can also access the erase tool. If you have drawn something with a brush, you can hold down the touch short cut to access the erase tool with the same brush settings as the brush you drew with. That's handy. A quick way to access the erase tool. Let's see about this shape. Maybe I will just make the bottom a little bit more straight, I can zoom in and adjust the size of my eraser, maybe fix that edge a little bit. Let's move forward, turn on the visibility of the sketch layer again. Then I will draw my different parts of my little plants, the stems and the leaves and a pot. I will draw them in different layers. We'll make a new layer and make sure that it's below your pot layer. Choose a different color and maybe I will go for this one, for the stem. Let's see, how big is this? Maybe a little bit bigger. Then I'll just quickly draw the stems. You can turn off the visibility of the sketch layer. I might want to move the stems a little bit so I choose the selection tool and move the stems to the center of the pot. Then I turn on the visibility again of the sketch layer, make a new layer and I make sure that this layer is underneath the other layer. Then I choose a green color. Instead of drawing with the vector brushes, I will draw with the magnetic tool. This is a nice little technique to use if you like to draw with more sharp and maybe a more rough style. I just use the magnetic tool and I draw a little leaf. I use the fill tool to fill it. I get the question, if I want to fill this layer with vector or pixel, and as we're working with vectors, I will choose vector. Hit the select to see your result. Let's just continue and we can fix the details later on. I will do all of these leaves with the magnetic tool, maybe like that, I'll fill it, then select. That looks nice. Now I'm going to turn off the sketch layer. Press and hold on your touch shortcut and double tap the sketch layer. Maybe I want to fix some details with this leaf. I will just pick the eraser tool. Maybe something like that. Now we have our first plant and these little details, if I'm not that fond of this rough edge, I can fix that with the smooth tool in Illustrator later on. I usually don't care that much about these really small details here when I draw the motifs. Now we have our first plant finished. I think that I would like to add some texture to this. There's no way of adding vector textures in Adobe Fresco at this moment, as far as I know, and I've explored it a bit. But you can always draw your own vector textures and what I mean with that is like dots and lines and other shapes on top of your flat objects. That's usually how I add textures if I do at all. I tend to have a flat style with just some very minor texture effects. We're going to add some dots, I think, to the leaves here. Let's add a layer on top of the leaves and we will choose just regular white, a vector brush, the basic round and I will make a much smaller size for this. I think I will turn up the pressure dynamic a bit because that will make it a little bit of a drop shape when I draw a stroke. Let's see how that goes with those settings. Maybe something like that. Maybe I want to adjust the smoothing a bit. Now we're talking, something like this. That looks okay for now, we can adjust that later. I'll just continue with the rest of the leaves. I try to not add the drop shapes or the lines to even in lines because then you will get a much more stiff expression. To get a more hand-drawn feel, I try to add them random. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don't. As I said, I usually don't care that much about the small little details when I draw the motifs for my patterns. I usually fix those details in Illustrator later on. That looks good, I would say. I'm quite happy with how that turned out. Now we have our first plant and I plan on making about four or five different plants. We did this one with the digital sketching so now we will do the next one with the hand-drawn sketch. But first, let's put these together in one layer. I will say that if you want to adjust your separate objects more in this stage, you should keep them on one layer each, but I want to show you a setting now. I will just merge this layer down, tap the layer, merge down, merge down and merge down. There you have your first plant. You could, if you want to resize this, because this is our art board where I plan to draw five plants. If you draw this big plant that I did, you could just tap the selection tool and make it smaller. But an awesome feature in Adobe Fresco that I haven't seen before in a drawing app is that you can adjust the size of your art board when you're in the document. Tap the settings and here you can adjust the size. I will go for maybe 3,000 instead of 1,000 and hit Okay. This is my new size of the art board. Hit Done and there you have a bigger size. That's a really awesome feature. Now we have one plant so let's just move that aside a bit. Choose the selection tool and just drag that over there and tap Done.
6. Draw Motives 2: We will use our hand-drawn sketch to draw the next plant and to do that, we will just take a photo of it with the iPad. I'll just hit the little image placement button and you can choose if you want to take from a camera, camera files or Creative Cloud. I will take a photo with the camera and it looks like this. Remove the sketch, hit 'Use Photo' and we have a new image layer with our photo of the sketch. Just tap done and bring down the opacity of that layer. For this example, I will draw this center plant. This is a really simple technique if you prefer to draw motifs by hand and then digitize them. You just take a photo of your sketch as we did and you place it in fresco, make a new layer on top, and then you start to draw. You can choose to bring down the opacity a little bit more so that you can see more clear. On a new layer, I use the vector brush and use this pink color for the pot. I want to make sure that I have the settings that I like with the pressure dynamics, the smoothness, in the middle and see how big that is,that's good. Minibits and I draw the pot. Let's see how that turned out. I fill in that layer. Tap on the touch shortcut and double-tap on the sketch layer. We can fix these details later on. I will add a little bit of that, so that it is straight. Next step is to make the little plant here and for that, I will just make another layer, make sure that it's beneath the pot layer. Pick my green color, the vector brush and adjust the size a bit. I just redraw on top of my sketch and fill those leaves in and see how that turned out. I want to do them like the stem a little thicker. Let's turn off the sketch layer and see how it looks and I'm happy with that. I want to adjust the rotation of the plant, hit the selection tool and adjust it a little bit. I want to adjust the pots. I will merge those layers down because I know that I don't want to change in that anymore. I have both of those objects in one layer. Hit the selection tool, resize that a bit and place it. This is what you need to know to draw simple vector shapes in Adobe fresco. I will continue to draw my plans and speed up the process for you. We have 5 different plants and the way that I draw motifs for patterns is that, I like to visualize my pattern in this early stage of the process. To do that, I will either draw out the whole pattern with a bunch of different motifs or as here, when I have phi motifs, I can repeat them a little bit on the art board to be able to visualize how the pattern might look. What you can do is to make your canvas a little bit bigger again. That's the quickest way of getting these objects smaller. You could also, as mentioned before, use the selection tool and adjust the size of each of the object, but this is much quicker and what I do here to visualize the pattern is that I take, for example, the cacti. I tap that layer and I duplicate it, then I move it there and you can flip it. This is a little trick if you only draw a few objects for your patterns to make it more interesting, you can flip it like this, and it will look almost like a different motif. You could also change the color, of that little pot to a light pink. Then I will just continue to duplicate and flip some more. You can rotate it a bit so that it will be a little bit more straight. I want to change the color of this to pink one, that looks better. I will continue to duplicate the plant, maybe some of them I will flip and some of them I will just keep the same direction, duplicate move and flip. Now you can see the pattern coming together and I'll duplicate this one and move it, over here, flip it. That didn't look that good, flipped, will just keep it as it is, I will change the color of the part to this purple one and I'll just speed up for you. Now you get a visual of how the pattern could look. I will it keep like this and just continue to build a pattern in Illustrator and sometimes rearrange them completely. But for me, this makes it more visual how the pattern could be as a final piece and I get a good vibe knowing how the motifs would work together. That's it. All of them motifs are drawn, finished and we place them so that we can visualize our pattern.
7. Export: So the last piece of the puzzle, the last thing to do is to export this artwork and you have a few options. Here's the export Tool. You can do a quick export which will make you export JPEG, for example. They can save to your camera roll or to your creative cloud library. But what we will do is to go to publish an export. You can do a time-lapse export, which is pretty fun. But we will export this as a PDF because we will use this in Adobe Illustrator. If you would have drawn with pixels, you can export it as a PSD. You can also export it as a PNG and JPEG, but we will export it as a PDF. Hit Export. And I will save mine to my desktop and then we're finished. We have exported this as a PDF that you can use in Adobe Illustrator. To learn how I make patterns in Adobe Illustrator, I have a different course here on skill share, that's called from sketch to repeat pattern and you're more than welcome to check that out if you want to continue this drawing of the motifs to the next step where you will make a pattern of them. That's it. We have drawn our cute little plants, visualized our pattern and exported them as a PDF.
8. Final Thoughts: That's all for this class. I hope you had fun drawing with me today and that you're as excited as I am about Adobe Fresco. As I mentioned before in class, if you're interested in learning more about pattern design and how to turn your motifs to repeat patterns, you're more than welcome to check out my other classes here on Skillshare. Thank you so much for watching. If you don't want to miss out on my future classes, you can hit the ''Follow'' button by my name here below. If you have any questions at all, please ask them on the community page, and feel free to leave a review to let me know if you enjoyed this class. I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm also super excited to see what you create, so share your project here in class, and if you post it on Instagram, feel free to tag me @maja_faber. Thanks again for watching.
Maja Faber, Surface Pattern Designer
