Watercolor Painting with Adobe Fresco - Cabin in the Woods

some watercolor paintings might look simple until you actually try to create one yourself it is a tricky medium and you have to practice a lot to get good at it until now it was really complicated to get even close to real watercolor aesthetic digitally but thanks to Adobe fresco we finally have a tool that does a brilliant job at simulating this medium in this video I will teach you how to make the most of a dhobi Fresco's watercolor brushes and show you some more advanced techniques along the way [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] here we are in adobe fresco I am using an iPad pro and the second-generation Apple pencil and the first thing that I wanted to show you is that now there is a new feature that you can use CC libraries for your color swatches so when you have a template created already in Photoshop or illustrator or a theme you can find that from the color picker here in fresco we have to do is to click on all at the bottom and then find the CC library that you created choose cabin in the woods in this case which I already created and I am going to pick the first color that I'm going to work with so you can see how quick and easy that was to find the color and the first detail I'm going to paint is the background the treeline and I am going to use the watercolor brushes from here I'm going to pick the watercolor round detail now the two most important values that you need to always keep an eye on is the to flow values when you work with watercolor brushes so there is the water flow and there is the flow now flow you can also consider being opacity and it's probably the easier way of thinking about it so let's say if we set the opacity or flow to 100% and also the water flow to hundred percent then that's how it's going to look like so let's just make the brush a little bit bigger by the way you can always just drag over these values to see the changes so that's one hundred and hundred now if I reduce the flow let's just go down to around 20 then it's much more dimmed so that's what I'm saying it's similar to opacity and if I put the flow back to 100 and then we choose the water float let's say to around 20 then what happens is that it stays much sharper so it doesn't blur out or blend into the background so these two values are always something to keep an eye on and I'm going to keep on changing them while I'm working on this composition I'm going to go back a couple of steps by using two fingers tap I'm going to undo these steps now what you need to pay attention to when you are painting with these watercolor brushes is that if you keep adding paint you see it continuously adds on to the canvas the paint so the more you paint over certain details the more it increases in saturation and visibility so you want to avoid going over certain areas too many times so if I just paint a couple of branches quickly I'm not pressing it too hard so it's not building up too much paint in one area so something like this now if some areas got too dense and you would like to lighten them up or blurt them out and make them a bit more faint there is a very quick technique to do that and that's basically to add pure water without paint and the way you do this is by double tapping on this little touch shortcut lid on the bottom left so double tap on that when it lights up that means you can start using it so if I paint anywhere notice that it's not adding more paint it's just adding water so it just blurs out the existing details so I can just try it out here on the edges but what I wanted to use it is actually here at the bottom so what I can do is to drag these details further down and just blur them out a little bit so it just spreads a bit more on the canvas so it blends all these details a little bit even further together and I like this tree for the background but I would like to have it slightly even more vague just so it feels like it's further away from us so for this I'm going to select the color and I'm going to make it less saturated and maybe a little bit brighter as well so don't forget to switch back to adding paint so double tap on the touch shortcut and then let's go back to the original brush that we were using and I'm going to paint another tree next to it so we can see which one works better but I think I'm going to use both of them next to each other it's good to have a little bit of variety and you can see how these colors already start to mix nicely at the bottom now I am going to come back and add more details on these trees later but for now I'm just going for a very quick sketch here and I will probably increase the size a bit of this tree just so it stands out a bit a bit taller than the other one that's good and now let's switch to the other color that we have in our swatches so I'm going to use this red color and let's paint with this another tree next to these other ones I'm going to draw the center line and then spread it out from there all these branches I love how these colors start blending together that's a really nice effect there and I think that's good now to pick a color you just have to tap and hold on any detail so maybe pick this original color from the left I'm going to drew a smaller tree here just paint around here and I let it nicely mix together that's the whole fun of working with watercolor that we will always have these interesting blends created okay so as a smaller tree there once again let's pick this color now and I'm going to add another detail here keep adding some friends to these trees here like Bob Ross used to say so I have I think enough detail now for one line of trees and we can start adding the other one but before I go any further I can go into the properties for this layer and I can reduce its opacity so that's a really cool thing we don't have to really worry about making this tree line too intense because we can always just knock it back a bit by reducing the opacity that's fine and now let's create a new layer I'm going to tap on the plus sign here and I feel like the trees are a little bit too big so first of all I go back to that layer use the move tool and I'm going to reduce their size so I will set them up to something like this I press done and now we can select the next layer and on this layer I'm going to use the original color that I was supposed to work with and I will also increase the flow so the opacity I was set to higher something like this and I'm going to start painting these additional trees here in the front so now you can see they feel much closer to us because they are more vibrant and they are more vivid in colors okay something like that now let's pick that other color that we have prepared the red color so I'm not trying to achieve a completely realistic color theme it's more like a duotone color theme that I'm going for here and it's more artistic or stylized representation of a forest you can also use the selection tools and use in this case I'm going to use the rectangular marquee tool let's just make another selection make sure it's completely selected and then use the move tool and then we can resize it we can also distort it stretch it out and even rotate it with this little value here at the bottom so if I want I can have it more rotated that way okay let's just squeeze it in a bit and then press done to accept the changes and then deselect to be able to continue painting now I'm going to speed up this part a bit because I'm just going to repeat the same thing I'm just adding a couple of additional trees in both the background and the foreground okay so we have a couple of more trees now and I think this will be enough but what we can do is to group these two layers together we could even merge them together but I'd like to keep things non-destructive so I can always go back and amend the opacity for example for the second treeline so the quick and easy way to group layers together is simply to drag these two layers on top of each other notice that it became a group if I tap on it twice I can see what's inside and then I can tap on the little arrow to go back seeing my layers now the good thing about having a group is that I can now use the move tool and move both of these layers together but I can also resize them so I'm going to keep the size of it's smaller and keep it in the center of my canvas so I'm going to create an additional layer and put this layer under the group or beneath the group and I'm going to pick another color that I have saved into the CC library and this is for the background mountains now of course if you were doing this traditionally it would start in the background and then make your way to the front but once again because we are working digitally it doesn't really matter and it's actually a big advantage because we can create our composition and develop our composition on the way so what I'm going to do is to use again the brushes that we have here but for this I'm going to use the wash flat brush which is much bigger and with that I am going to paint the mountains in the background so let's just try to keep them fairly natural something a bit believable and it's just a simple silhouette here in the background and I'm going to make sure it's filled in the gaps behind the trees as well so all of these colors here are nicely filled and what you can also do is to use the eraser tool so select the eraser tool and set it to a brush like the hard round variable brush with which you can go around the edges and tidy them up so this is almost like masking it after you drew it so I'm just going to make the silhouette a little bit more believable as a mountain and here as well just make it a bit sharper something like that I think is going to work and on this side I'm going to bring it down a bit so again it looks a little bit more believable I like to keep the tree line as almost like a framing device as well so I don't let the mountain details go beyond it but that's again personal taste it's up to you how you do it but I feel like this looks quite nice you can also check with out the mountains this is how it would look like and with the mountains I think it adds a nice depth again to the composition but now it's time to add a little bit more wash on the bottom on the trees so for this I'm going to select again the group DoubleTap on it to go inside and then select that layer which is closer to us and on that one I will use the watercolor brush called watercolor Vette spatter and I will DoubleTap on the touch shortcut so it's only adding water and I will make the brush size bigger and start painting over here on the bottom so this really blends all these details together and creates a big mess here but this is exactly what we need because you will see soon what we are going to do is a nice reflection here for now I'm just painting over like that and maybe I will also use the watercolor round detail still using only color but maybe now I'm going to add a bit more paint just so it blends a little bit better so fill up these details maybe a little bit more paint here on the red and there and then here on the left as well okay it's time to draw the cabin now for this I am going to create yet another layer outside of the group and I'm going to start this time differently as I will actually create a selection first I would like to create an outline or a silhouette for this object and for this probably the best tool to use is the lasso tool so with that I am going to draw the outline of the cap in just roughly it doesn't have to be perfect something like that I'm actually happy with this but what I'm going to do is to switch to the other selection tool the rectangular marquee tool and make sure here on the tool bar on the left i select the subtract mode with that i can subtract this part here on the left subtract a similar-sized detail here on the right and then also subtract from the bottom so that keeps that edge straight that looks quite symmetrical to me and also works quite nicely so now in this new layer we can select our brush and also select the other color the fourth color we have a new so far this brown color and with that I can just quickly paint over this detail now you can see when you have action paint we'll fill it in completely but what you can do is to pick the brush that works better maybe for this like the wash soft brush but which you can have a little bit more variety on how the color will spread into this selection and I'm going to show you another really cool technique now so you can move your selection without affecting the contents of the layer and the way you do this is by clicking one more here at the bottom and choose transform selection so now I can move it down somewhere around here yeah that's good I press done and now I'm going to make my color darker so I select the color picker and make the color darker and I will also make my brush smaller and then paint around these details here so essentially what I'm creating is a shading so I'm trying to create an effect where the roof is costing a shadow the only thing I noticed is that I went a little bit too far here on the left side so I'm going to just deselect this and using the eraser tool I will delete back from this left side here so you can now see what I wanted to achieve but I also feel like I need to add a little bit more detail on the roof so I will just pick a color from here and just paint over this part a little bit more maybe with a little bit smaller brush okay that's nice maybe even smaller brush okay so it's not see-through and it's actually good to go around the edges a bit just to give it a little bit more interest that's probably a bit too much now you can see sometimes watercolor can get out of control and then we lose that nice line that we created there in these cases what you can also do if you don't want to mess things up is to bring back the selection that you had so if I choose the selection tool I can tap on it again and choose load last selection but not only that I can also invert my selection so I can go to more and choose invert selection which means now if I start painting I can paint outside of this selection and I can fill up these details easily so this is also a very useful technique and worth noting okay now I'm using the eraser tool a bit erasing into the edges and maybe race into this corner point here I'm not going to stress too much about the shape of this cabinet I don't want it to be completely symmetrical so I'm going to deselect it now zoom back a bit and I actually quite like the way it looks now again I'm just going to speed things up a bit so I can add a few more details on the Hat without using any new feature so same exact things what we've done before so you can see I actually created a couple of layers for the cabin but I don't need to keep these separate so I'm going to merge them together the easiest way to do that is to click on the one on the top and choose merge down then once again March down merge down and until I have all of them merged so that's one layer now most of the time I prefer to keep everything on separate layers but sometimes it just doesn't really make sense to do that so it's just easier to move things around now and also if I want to add any more details on this cabin I can do it much easier because it's on one layer by the way if you are working with watercolor layers you can also dry a layer to make sure that the paint doesn't mix anymore with the existing paint on that layer so this is the feature here you just tap on a layer thumbnail and then choose a dry layer so in this case if I start painting over this you notice how the paint is not mixing anymore with the previous paint well if I paint over this one that I just painted it's going to keep blending together so there's one last thing before we create the reflection and as just a few more details in the foreground that will tie things together so this is going to be again on a separate layer on top of everything else using the same brushes that we use before but this time I'm going to set the color to white now this has its own little shortcut here on the top left I'm going to select that color so I would like to add a couple of dead trees in the foreground so let's just start with one here on the right I will increase the size of my brush a bit and then I will also add a few little vegetation here and the bottom also before the building we can have something and then also let's just add another that treat it could even be something that's a bit crooked why not something like that just a little skeleton here on the left side I'm going to add one more layer here and to keep it completely straight I will use the ruler tool from here at the bottom right once I select that I can set my ruler up and it snaps to zero degrees so it will be completely horizontal so somewhere around here I think is going to work quite nicely but for this I'm actually going to use a pixel brush and I think I'm going to go over that ink I'm going to select that and I'm going to paint along this top edge something like that now let's hide the ruler to see how it looks once again because it's on a separate layer the good thing about it is that we can use the move tool and then move it up or down but I think that's going to work quite nicely yeah let's just accept that and I'm going to now put everything into one group so I'm going to move this down merge these together the cabin can also come down and then these come down as well and the only layer I'm not going to move is this line that which is created instead I'm going to select the group and go to the options and choose duplicate layer group once I selected this additional layer group I'm going to tap on again and choose merge layers in group now we can also move it under the previous layer group and now comes the coolest part when it becomes reflection so the move tool and click on flip vertical here on the top right and then move it down and there you go there's a lovely reflection it looks nice but the thing is that everything needs to move slightly up so we can see a bit more of the reflection I will also squeeze in a bit and then press done because when details are outside of the canvas they will be lost or cropped but once you accept the transformation I'm going to click continue because I can always recreate this if I want to but now I'm going to select the layer on top move it up a bit also select this layer with the line and move it up and place it somewhere here in the middle but to make the reflection more believable I'm going to select that layer and I'm going to change its opacity so reduce the opacity to something like that but also what I'm going to do is since it's one single layer I can use the brush tool with the watercolor brushes double tap on the touch shortcut and then probably use the wash soft and make a really big brush size and what I'm going to do is to paint over this bottom section here now that can be blended completely together but then we need to be much more subtle as we get closer to that line in the center so I'm just going to paint over gently on a few details here and there the cabin just slightly and I think that's already looking quite good now if you wanted to avoid having paint all the way at the bottom of your canvas you can rescue that by painting over these details on separate layer using white color with one of the watercolor brushes like the watercolor wet spatter and then you can just simply paint over it but make sure that the flow is that 200 and then the water flow you can set it to whatever value you wish to work with and notice what happens here is that we get this really cool edge that's going to plan nicely together and it almost adds a bit of venturi vibe to the whole composition which we can obviously emphasize even more if we use the same brush here in the fork and on another layer let's just create one more layer and just paint over here we can just add a little bit more like snow texture even here in front of the cabin something like that alright so that's all I wanted to show you in this tutorial and this was a demonstration of using watercolor brushes in Adobe fresco now of course you can do a lot of different styles with this and if you are interested to see more tutorials like this one let me know in the comment section below and I will try to cover it as soon as I can thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever we release new videos click on the link on my right and start your membership today to get access to over 200 hours of training courses and personal mentoring by me and my team of creative professionals have fun learning guys and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 48,305

Keywords: Watercolor Painting with Adobe Fresco - Cabin in the Woods, fresco, adobe fresco, digital watercolor, adobe fresco cc, how to draw with fresco, digital watercolor tutorial, how to paint watercolors, watercolor painting landscape, going from traditional to digital art, digital painting process, watercolor painting for beginners, adobe fresco tutorial, digital painting, digital art, digital painting for beginners, digital watercolor speedpaint, watercolor painting easy

Id: cbVquz-AuSw

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020