Adobe Fresco Tutorial for Beginners: Getting Started!

as a professional illustrator I do nearly all of my work in Adobe Fresco on the iPad in this video I'll provide an overview of the app all the different tools so you'll be ready to dive in and make some rad stuff and hey if you're already using Fresco maybe stick around anyway because I'll be sharing some of my favorite tips and tricks that maybe you don't know about maybe you do I don't know you can leave if you want there are a few reasons why Adobe Fresco is my preferred app over similar apps like procreate one of the main reasons is that it's part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite and as a professional illustrator I'm often working with Photoshop and Illustrator files as those are the industry standard Fresco files work seamlessly back and forth between the different Adobe apps which makes it really great for my workflow and speaking of workflow a typical workflow for me that's a bunch of workflows in a row let me just flow that into the rest of this so maybe I'll start with a sketch in Fresco and then go over to my computer open it up in Photoshop maybe make some adjustments there save the file then go back to my iPad and the file is already updated with whatever I did in Photoshop I can go back and forth like this this as many times as I want to and it just works perfectly because in fact Fresco files are actually Photoshop files which is why photoshop brushes work in Fresco because it's the same thing now I know you can easily export a PSD from procreate but that involves a whole other step because you have the PSD but then you have to open it up you can work on that PSD and then you could import it back into procreate but in Fresco it's as easy as saving the file and then it's already there when you go onto your iPad I actually have a very detailed video going over the differences between procreate and Fresco if you're interested in that I will put a link in the description another reason why I love Adobe Fresco is because sometimes I need to deliver Vector artwork for some of my client work when I'm in Fresco I can easily work in vector or raster I can work in both in the same file it's as simple as just choosing Vector brushes and drawing whatever I need to draw I can then open up that file in illustrator and it is ready to go in all of its Vector glory and the other main reason I prefer Fresco is because of how easy it makes it to add motion to your illustrations I know in procreate you can use the animation assistant and make easy frame by frame animations but in Fresco you're able to have a timeline for each layer and you're also able to add motion pass as well it's incredibly Dynamic and if you want to know more about that I'll link below to some videos where I go over animating in Fresco actually I think Adobe refers to it as motion and I think that's a better way to think about it because it's not really animation software neither procreate or Fresco or animation software they're just a way to add motion to your illustration you wouldn't animate like a full cartoon in either of these I feel like a lot of beginner or just like getting started with videos about different apps go into so much detail that they're a bit overwhelming in this video I'm not going to go over everything but I'm going to go over enough to get you started and just dive in and start working without feeling like there's too much to learn so if you're here on this video needing to know every specific detail and all the things you can do in Fresco this probably isn't the video for you but if you're starting out in Fresco and you're a little bit confused and just want some tips and tricks you're in the right place all right let's head over to my iPad and dive into Fresco I'll meet you there okay so I have Fresco opened up here this is the home screen and you'll see some options on the side the learn and discover I to be honest with you I think I don't know I think those are there to teach you some stuff I have never used those below that you'll see files you'll see your files and then over here is like recent files and then you could like share files between other people in Fresco and then you've got deleted files which will be there for a little bit of time before they're gone forever this is sort of like file Purgatory I think maybe it's 30 days or something like that I don't know for sure but they don't immediately go away okay so when you click on your files it's going to open up your most recent files this will be anything that you have saved in Creative Cloud so if you have like a Photoshop file or something like that it will show up here that's saved there and then you can open it up and edit it like that all right so I'm going to go ahead and do a new document and I'm going to choose a custom size and when you're choosing a size you just want to make sure that your file is big enough for what you want to do with it so for example if you ever want to be printing something you need to make sure it's a minimum of 300 DPI at whatever inch size that you want to use or centimeters if you are in the rest of the world that use a system that makes sense I am in silly America so we're using inches but here you could type in a size so let's say I was going to make something to print and I wanted it to be 8 by 10. so I would choose 8 by 10 but then I would make sure that this is 300 DPI this isn't a video where I'm going to go into all that stuff but just know that 300 DPI is the minimum resolution for printing a document 300 DPI at 100 scale so we got 8 by 10 300 DPI create document and now we have our file here the first thing you'll notice when you're in Fresco as opposed to like procreate or something like that is there's three different kinds of brushes so the first brush set is just regular raster brushes so this is just like procreate um these are you know what you would expect the more pixel based brushes below that is the live brushes now I don't use these because I'm not a painter but these things are super cool and they're the kind of thing that like I always show people when I'm showing them Fresco or something like that just because it's magical so just just quickly because I can't help myself so these watercolor brushes and like the oil brushes are like they're real so you can like reactivate them with color and stuff like that um so let's just pick a bright orange color and start painting and you can see that you know you go over it it just starts to bleed into it you could grab another color let's say we switch to this red you know they just it like reactivates and you know you can get pretty wild with this stuff super cool I don't use these at all but if you're a painter uh these are super cool the oil brushes are very similar the cool thing about this is you could like mix them here even though you kind of wouldn't be able to do that in real life all right let's uh delete this mess now below the live brushes are your vector brushes so this is one of the things that I mentioned that sets Fresco apart so when you're working here everything you're drawing is Vector Line work which is super great you can zoom in infinitely and it's going to be tight as can be because there's no pixels involved so underneath the vector brushes there are some options I really just use the basic round brush I don't like any of these other options they're um there's this like velocity taper I will note too though that I have my smoothing up pretty high which makes it look like there's a little bit of a lag there's not a lag that's just how the smoothing Works which I'm going to talk about in a minute but anyway these are the vector brushes when you're working in Vector you'll notice on your layers you'll have this little double circle icon that just means it's a vector layer you can see that same thing under the brush it's like that white circle with the blue that means it's a vector layer so you can have both Vector layers and pixel layers so if I do a new layer and I grab a pixel brush and I draw on this layer you'll see that that one has the pixel icon this is the way you can keep them separate and it's cool that you can work in both raster and Vector in one file so um the Eraser tool is below that I honestly don't really use the regular eraser that much I use the modifier with the brush so let me show you how that works so let me grab a brush that I like and use often so this retro Supply Co classic anchor if you're interested in these retro brushes there's a link in my profile to those so this brush has some tooth to it I'm zoomed in a little bit see you can kind of see that detail but let's say I want to erase this and I grab the standard eraser and I go in and erase that it's got this like clean line and it's hard to sort of make this texture look natural when I erase it so let me undo that go back to the brush so instead of using the Eraser you can just double tap on this little modifier circle thing and this changes your brush to an eraser in that same brush so you can maintain that same texture which is really cool and then you just double tap to turn it back off I feel like this is easier than grabbing the Eraser as well below that is like a smudge tool or something I I don't use this to be honest but you can smudge I mentioned that this isn't going to cover everything but this is going to get you started so uh you know that's the this is not the video where we talk about the smudge tool so let's um let's delete that and we'll go down this is your select tool we can't select anything because our layer is empty but if I draw something here I can grab the selection tool and then I can move it around or transform it or skew it or just distort it in some way there's also the liquify which is cool but I don't really use it that often I don't know you can do cool stuff with it you can make interesting shapes with it it's a nice feature there's different options you can like make it suck into the center or blow it up it's a good way to like Smooth out shapes and stuff like that I just always sort of forget about it but it's a cool feature so we've got the selection tool below that there's like the lasso tool which you can draw a selection around a certain area and then it'll select that area if you want to like cut and paste that selection if you tap on the layer you can go to cut selection and then paste selection and now we've got that shape on its own layer you can also use the magic wand selection and that just selects like the full whatever shape you've got there you can also like paint select to like paint an area that you want to select I don't really use this one either but it's actually pretty handy and then you've got typical shape selection things and then you can also load the last selection if you like deselect something and then want to reselect it at the bottom you'll see some tools that pop up for what you're using so this is to like transform what's being selected and then you can erase what's in the selection so I what I have selected is actually not on the layer I'm working on so if I click down on this layer and hit erase it'll get rid of that because that's what was selected up at the top here you'll see these two arrows pointing different directions this is undo and this is redo so if I do undo it'll undo what I just erased if I hit this it'll redo erasing it so let's deselect that let's move down to the paint bucket the Paint Bucket is a helpful tool if you're used to procreate you'll know that you sort of drag a color down to fill a spot when you are using Fresco use a paint bucket tool like Photoshop and you just sort of tap where you want to fill you'll see that there's this white halo around the edges you can adjust that with your color margin here you can pull this up until it goes away the reason why I like the Paint Bucket versus dragging it in is because if you have like multiple things like this you can just go in and tap them both as opposed to like dragging for each thing in procreate below that we've got some shapes to be honest I don't use these either but you can insert shapes from you know Adobe stock or whatever they're providing here not something that I use not something you need to worry about unless you want to use those things below that is your text tool you just can click start typing pulls up the keyboard and you can do butt fart because that is something you might type and then you'll see here style text this is where you can choose a font and then you could change the size here you can adjust the spacing if you want more spacing between the letters you can do that you can also go back to like the transform tool and change the size that way if you wanted to like edit your type like it's an image you could go ahead and tap on that type layer and then convert to the pixel layer and then you could draw like directly on this layer so if you like grab your brush you know you could be adding to it or customizing it or you could erase parts of it you could put some sweet motion lines on it you can do whatever you want below that is the eyedropper tool this allows you to select a color so you would just like hold on it and it would grab a color obviously we don't have any colors here but if we did that's how you would do it you can also use that from like if you're in the the brush and you're drawing you don't have to switch to the eyedropper tool you can just be in the brush drawn this you got white you're like okay I want to draw black now you could just hold on this and then it'll switch to Black so that's pretty helpful below that is if you want to add an image to your document so if I went ahead and let's say I grabbed my the skull drawing that I did I'll load that in there which is pretty cool the other thing that adobe does if you saw that little update is that it creates a color palette from your image so this is a cool thing if you find an image that you really like the colors on and you want to steal them it'll automatically create a palette for you so when we go into our colors here you'll see this color palette was generated from this image so that's a really cool feature that is nice so when your image is placed you'll notice it's got this like image icon that means it's not something that you can draw with or work with because it's like an image file but you can go ahead and convert it to a pixel layer and then you can do whatever you want with it you can draw with it you can you know erase stuff whatever you want to do you could go in and grab the liquify brushes start messing around with that with the liquify brushes I don't know I don't use them but as you can see you could do some cool stuff with it like that type effect is kind of cool like that I might have to use this more often uh look at this uh what we got here this is this is some good stuff um I'm gonna clean up some of this stuff so we just have a fresh clean layer so that I can talk about some stuff so going over the tools um I started like just willy-nilly talking about layers so I guess I should cover that so that this makes sense for uh overall you know beginners when you are drawing it's going to show up on whatever layer is selected unless you have a raster layer and you start drawing with a vector brush then it's automatically going to make a new layer because you can't draw a vector on a raster layer so what I'll often do with the layers is go in and grab like a pencil brush to sketch something out [Music] and just draw some letters I don't know so I'll like sketch something get it to roughly what I want it to look like so maybe some 3D letters that say what and then I'll turn down the opacity and then make a new layer and then draw a tighter version on top of that so sometimes it's another sketch so maybe I won't go right to an inking brush or something I want to use yet because I still want to refine this and I'll use this as like a guide so I'll like lower the transparency or the opacity of the layer which you know you can do here this controls how much to the layer you see and then maybe I want it to like wiggle a little bit so I'll use that sketch layer underneath make some Wiggly lines like that so I'm just sort of getting a feel for the comp composition and it's okay that's that's good enough for me so then I'll like go ahead I'll go back in and delete that first sketch layer and then I'll use this then I'll make a new layer to do like my tightened up line work so that at that point I'll often switch to you know this classic anchor that I like a lot or Kyle Webster is too smooth to be forgotten I'm gonna go back to this classic anchor because that's the one I like so I want to do some black line work so I'll switch this to Black and if I'm doing some like smooth lines like this what I'll do is I'll turn up the smoothing on my brush and this will help it make a clean line without me having to be that smooth so as you can see it's already at 100 because that's where I often use this but let me show you the difference so when this is turned all the way down so I'm trying to make this like smooth edge it's uh you know I'm doing an okay job now but sometimes if it's early in the day and I've had a lot of coffee my hands aren't that steady so let's let's undo that and then let's look at the difference so if you click on this little smoothing thing bring that up to a hundred then it gives it a little bit of a delay because it sort of slows things down but it gives you a really nice smooth line I know there's some people who aren't used to this how the smoothing Works whoops I'm not wearing my gloves so sometimes I accidentally undo things um people who aren't used to the way the smoothing works might think that there's like lag in Fresco if they have if they're using a brush with the smoothing turned all the way up but it's just the way that the smoothing works it just slows things down and if you don't like that you can just bring it all the way down to zero and they'll be absolutely no leg whatsoever so that's that's how I would do this and that would how I would do my final Line work or whatever and then I would go in and delete my sketch layer so let me just uh finish this up quickly so that I can show you some like coloring options that the layers are good for this is not very good but I just want something to do a quick demo with so I'm gonna get over the fact that I hate this okay so I'll use the paint bucket fill that in Black and let's say I want to do my color on a separate layer so what I can do is delete my sketch layer and make a new layer I can set this layer as a reference layer so when you tap on a layer it opens up this menu that shows you all your different options here where you can like clear it or delete it or duplicate it copy paste it whatever you want to do but if you do set as a reference then go on a different layer and grab a color it'll fill in that shape but on a separate layer which is pretty cool so your color is is separate there so let's delete that color thing let's release reference another thing you can do is you could lock the transparency and what that would do is just make it so that whatever you draw will just go in the spaces where you have a drawing so for example if I'm drawing here you don't see anything but then once I get to the line work that color comes in I use this sometimes if I'm trying to like add some grit or Texture so I'll lock transparency and like grab a texture brush this one for example choose White and then sort of like come in and add some grit and texture to it you could do this another way a non-destructive way by making a new layer and then hitting this this clipping mask button so you could do this in a non-destructive way by hitting this a new layer and then doing the clipping mask option which is this little square with the arrow so this will do the same thing but it puts it on a a separate layer so that you can toggle it on and off and it doesn't mess with your you know initial Line work which is which is a cool feature all right so let's go back to where we had the color on that separate layer if you wanted to group these so that if you had a lot of stuff in your composition and you wanted to keep things separately or if you wanted to resize this what you could do is click and hold on layer and then drag it onto the one below that and now these are in a group together so now if we use the transform tool it's going to transform everything within that group which is pretty cool you can also do a clipping mask onto that whole group so if we grabbed this like texture it would do it over the the whole thing even though they're separate layers so the other things over here are this plus makes a new layer the eye turns the layer on or off that's your clipping mask layer this is your adjustments layer so if you wanted to like adjust you know anything within the image you could go ahead and make an adjustment layer on top of that and that way if you turned it off you'd still have your original color which is a helpful feature and then you've just got more layer options here which are the same as if you just like clicked on a on a layer on its own when you're ready to save an image you would go up here and you could do a quick export if you just wanted a you know quick jpeg or something or PNG or you can go into publish uh and then you've got some more options here so you can do export as you could choose a PNG hit exports save image you could also go in here and Export a time lapse so we could watch a a time lapse of this incredible artwork that I created I do have a video about patterns which goes over what that does it's a really cool feature so if you want to check that out I will put a link to my patterns video in the description So within the layers you've got different blend modes which affects how they're seen the only one I really use is multiply so I often will add like a texture onto my images so if I go in here to my photos and go to albums favorites grab a texture so let's say I have this paper texture if I turn the blend mode to multiply you'll see it overlays the texture on top of my illustration there's all kinds of different things you can do with layer effects but again this is just a video to get started so I'm not going to go into all that stuff because this video would be a million years long I do want to quickly touch on the animation features but I do have full on animation videos in Fresco as I mentioned at the beginning but just quickly let me show you what you can do with the animation features so to animate you just click on this little thing down below and this opens up a timeline and you can have a timeline for each and every layer so let's say draw a circle you hit plus if you go into settings below this you could turn on onion skin and that'll show you your previous frame so I'm just gonna Trace that Circle again do another one Trace that again and then you could hit play and then you've got this moving shape so that's just like animation assist and procreate but Fresco also gives you paths so if you hit path here we can draw a path and then that's going to follow that path if you look over on the right we've got some different options so we can decrease the amount of frames to make it go faster or add more frames to make it go slower we could also ease in and out so it starts slow and then gets fast we could use this um grow and Shrink to where it gets bigger as it goes down you can choose the amount of time something happens there's also this sway option which is pretty cool which you know it moves a little bit it's a little hard to tell because my image is the same thing but if you had more variety in your shape that would change you can also add multiples which is really cool you can just get a whole bunch of them and then you could like scatter them and you could also like randomize them so it like changes and it's crazy because it's just like this one little circle that's like vibrating uh it's so easy to like add all these different things okay so let's pause that so the paths are something that sets Fresco animation apart but on top of that as I mentioned each layer can have its own timeline so if I do a new layer and let's say we put something on this layer grab a different color try not to overthink this here let's say we've got this monster make a new layer let's open a mouth maybe he's cut feet [Music] this is gonna be the worst uh block sequence ever but listen this isn't a drawing tutorial we'll see how this goes all right so that's terrible but we um we put it on path and have it walk across we could say oh that's too low let me move it up now it's on the scene so that guy's walking across we get make a whole Army of these little things randomize those you try the sway thing as you can see they're like going different directions scatter them and see we've got we've got chaos going on here it's pretty neat so that's why Fresco animation is just completely Superior to procreate in that regard so that's the gist of it again this isn't super detailed I just wanted to show you the like the basics and all that stuff so that wasn't so bad was it are you feeling inspired to go make some cool stuff in Fresco hopefully you are hopefully you learned something from this and if you make some cool stuff and post it on social media definitely tag me because I'd love to check it out and hey if you are excited about Fresco and want to learn even more check out this playlist I've got which has a whole bunch of different videos all about Adobe Fresco okay good talk

Channel: Chris Piascik

Views: 199,743

Keywords: illustration, chris piascik, adobe fresco, adobe fresco tutorial, adobe fresco for beginners, adobe fresco ipad, how to use fresco, adobe fresco update, fresco tips, adobe fresco drawing, adobe fresco vs procreate, adobe fresco tutorial for beginners, adobe fresco vector, adobe fresco painting, adobe fresco ipad drawing, adobe fresco ipad review, ipad drawing tutorial adobe fresco, learn adobe fresco

Id: pW2QpieN4fE

Length: 29min 12sec (1752 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023