Hello, hello my creative friends!
Today I’ve decided to talk to you about the long-awaited Adobe Fresco. Yes it’s finally here! And I’m getting very excited about this new app.
OK, I’m not the best person for new technology, or any technology for that matter! But I had a quick look at this app and I’m loving it already. I do like Procreate a lot, and I mean a lot. It has improved my workflow for pattern design 100 times already, but I can see the potential in AF and, provided I learn how to use it properly, I am sure it will improve my workflow (and possibly yours?) even more.
So lets talk about features; AF has three types of brushes, yes 3! Pixel brushes, Vector brushes and Live brushes, which by the way I am LOVING! These latter were created by Kyle T. Webster and are meant to recreate the behaviour of oils and watercolours and oh boy, do they do that! I haven’t played that much with the oil brushes, although I have seen that they give a texture incredibly similar to the real thing. The watercolour brushes really impressed me. Big time. Really. I mean, WHOA!
When you use the watercolour brush it even mimics the spreading and bleeding of the colour on wet paper and you can control the water flow and the colour flow. I am in awe. As much as I love Procreate, I have never seen such brushes and effects in Procreate. I had been looking for quite a while for a digital brush that gave you that effect and here it is now!
On the right there is a (not so good) example of watercolour effect I obtained with AF.
But it doesn’t end here; you can keep working on the wet layer or you can go to the layer and tap on it and you can chose the “dry layer” button and that will “dry” the paint you had on the layer so the next stroke will be like wet on dry. How cool is that!? Seriously!
If you use the Apple Pencil with these brushes you also have the added bonus of colour fluctuation according to pressure, which goes very well with watercolour effects. Fresco also remembers all the colours that have been used in a piece and gives you a series of thumbnails with every colour variation.
The interface in AF is really intuitive, so for someone like me this is an extra bonus. I haven’t really used Photoshop that much, but from what I’ve seen the AF interface mimics that of PS quite a lot.
Another thing I loved about the app is that the gesture shortcuts are similar to other apps; for example you can undo by tapping two fingers and redo by tapping three fingers, sounds familiar?
I have also managed to incorporate paintings from Procreate into AF. Like in the painting on the right, the tail of the fox was done in Procreate with alcohol inks and the rest was done in AF. As you can see I still have to master the watercolour technique in AF, but with practice one can do anything, right?
The brush option bar is similar to Procreate, with size, blending mode, shape dynamics, size etc; but here you can mark your brushes as favorite so you easily find them again when you need them.
The Touch Shortcut is another little feature that i like. When using the pixel brush, hold this button down and the brush will switch to the eraser keeping the properties of the brush itself.
If you want to use vector and raster in the same document Fresco will automatically create a new layer for you the moment you switch brush type and start painting.
There are quite a few features I haven’t had time to play with, such as time lapse for example.
Adobe Fresco is only available for the iPad at the moment but it will hopefully be available on android in the future. You can download a free version or, if you have a subscription to Adobe Photoshop or the “all apps subscription” in Adobe cloud you can have access to the full version.
In this case you can export your files as JPEG, PSD or PDF in which case you can open them on Illustrator, again, very cool!
If you want to learn a bit more about AF, and you have access to Skillshare, there are classes there already to explore; I will surely do that!
I hope you’ve found this blog helpful, do let me know what you think about the app if you have used it; do you like it as much as I do?
Till next time create and be happy! xox