526 Introducing Adobe Photoshop Sketch

- Hey gang, this is Dave McClellan. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, I'm going to introduce you to, what I consider to be, the best of the current crop of Adobe mobile apps. And that's this guy right here, Adobe Photoshop Sketch. Now, I'll happen to be working with an Ipad Pro, along with an Apple pencil, but you can just as easily use any IPad, or an IPhone for that matter, and there's all kinds of stylus's available to you, including those from Wacom and Adonit. You've got pencil by 53, as well as Adobe's own ink.

You can even draw with your own finger, if you like, so a bunch of different options available to you. Now, what I love about the IPad Pro, is that it's screen is about the same size as a standard piece of paper. And so I can draw just as if I were using conventional tools, making this, in my humble opinion, the best digital drawing solution out there, and I'm including Photoshop and Illustrator in that equation. And you can export the stuff directly to Photoshop, where you can print it, or do whatever you like, meaning that you can get real work done.

Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, let's start things off by launching Adobe Sketch. And if this is the first time you've used the program, then you're gonna see the splash screen. In my case, I'm seeing my last created piece of artwork. I'm gonna go ahead and close it by tapping on the word close, on the top left corner of the screen. And now notice that I have a bunch of projects that I've created in advance, here. I've got this one that we were looking at just a moment ago, over here on the right, I have a kind of coloring book project, and then over on the left, I have the most recent project I've created.

What I suggest we do at this point, is create a new project, by tapping on the + button on the far left side of the screen. And so notice now, we're brought immediately into the first sketch, inside of our new document. Just to show you what that looks like for a moment, I'm gonna close out of this sketch by once again, tapping on the close button in the top left corner of the screen. And notice this project, for one thing, it's not named, and to name the project, you just wanna double click on the word project, up there in the top left corner.

And then, to get rid of the word project, tap that little x. And now name this project, something like "demonstration", let's say. And then I'll tap the done button, in order to accept that change. I also want you to notice, that by default, at least in this version of Sketch, we have a total of five sketches inside of our new project. Let's say you want just one sketch to start with, then what you do, go ahead and tap this little page icon, in top right corner of your project, and then notice that it's replaced by a check mark, in which point you just want to go ahead and tap on those sketches that you want to delete, and I'm gonna get rid of the bottom four, and then you tap on the trash can icon, right to the left of that check mark, in the top right corner of the project, at which point you'll be prompted to make sure that you want to delete these sketches, after all, they might contain actual information.

In my case, they're blank so I'll just tap the okay button. Alright, now to re-open that blank sketch, just go ahead and tap on that big blank area inside the project, and in my case, that didn't work because I still have that check mark active, so I'll go ahead and tap the check mark in the top right corner of the project, in order to turn it off, and return it to that little page icon, and then I will tap inside the sketch in order to open it up. Alright, now let's take a look at the brushes that we're seeing along the left hand side of the screen.

And notice, in all, we're seeing a total of six brushes. Although, you can access more than that. The first one, by default, is a pencil, and so to demonstrate how that works, I once again, just to make sure you understand, I have a pressure sensitive Apple pencil, and so I'm just gonna go ahead and draw this thin line right here, and the only difference the pressure's gonna make, is in the opacity of the lines. So notice if I press light, I get a light line right here, and if I press harder, I get a dark line.

If you want thicker lines, then you need to work with the tilt of your pencil. And so for example, notice if I'm drawing from straight above, I get a thin line. If I draw from the side, like so, I get this big graphite line. And you can vary that on the fly, as you're seeing me do right here. So, that once again, is the function of tilt. Now, not all of your brushes support tilt, but many of them do. All right, now let's see how we modify a few attributes of this pencil. And so the first thing you do is tap on that active brush, which is the pencil, in order to bring up it's attributes.

And notice the first one is size, and to modify the size you just drag up and down on that little side circle. So you make it bigger if you drag up, and you'll make it smaller if you drag down. Now here's a curious item, notice if you're looking very closely, that we're seeing a little blue triangle next to the value when it turns 3.0, and what that tells you is that is the default setting, which is the size which the brush was originally created. So if you increase a size beyond that, then you're gonna be up sampling that brush, which may or may not be something you wanna do, but I just want you to see that that is an option, at which point, I get a much thicker brush, even when I'm painting straight down, as we're seeing here.

The next option is flow, which determines how much the brush intersects with itself at corners. And so notice, by default, it's 66, that's why we're seeing the little triangle there, but you can increase the flow value, which is gonna result in a kind of higher opacity, as well. But notice that we're getting more graphite at the corners. And then, finally, we have color, which I'll come back to in a moment. All right, now let's say you wanna switch to a different brush, you can close the current one just by tapping on that line, above the size value, which represents the graphite pencil, and that will go ahead and bring back your other brushes, and then you can switch to anyone you like, such as the third one down, which represents the marker brush, and notice that it has a tiny yellow edge on the far left side, and that indicates that it's set up by default, to paint with yellow.

And so I'm just gonna go ahead and add some yellow, as we're seeing here. Again, if you wanna modify any of the attributes, just tap that brush again, and we'll see the size value, which you can drag up and down, notice it's default is 15.0 pixels, right there. But I can make it bigger or smaller, if I like. I can also change the flow, and I'm gonna drag up on the flow, in order to make this brush more opaque. And again, this also affects how the brush interacts with itself, and you can change the color as well. And I'll show you how that works in just a moment, I promise, but first I wanna show you how to undo brush strokes inside sketch, because, after all, things are getting pretty darn dense at this point.

Well, you notice that the first of the icons in the top right corner of the screen, that is the undo icon, and so if I tap it, I'm gonna undo that last brush stroke. And you have multiple undos, so you can continue undoing as many brush strokes as you like, just by tapping that icon over and over again. The question, though, becomes, how do you redo brush strokes? How do you bring them back? Well, you do that with a double finger drag. So, here's how it works, if you drag two fingers to the left, then you're gonna undo a brush stroke, as I have just now.

Whereas if you do a two finger drag to the right, you're going to redo a brush stroke. So I'm just doing a two finger drag over and over again, until I bring back everything. But, in this case, right there, I accidentally drew a brush, which is not what I want, so it appears I'm not going to be able to bring back everything, because I've interrupted the redo process. Which is why, there's this other fantastic way of working, and I'm gonna show that off by scribbling some more on screen, just so that we have a mess of brush strokes going on.

And now, what I'll do, is a three finger drag. This one's a little tricky though, because you have to invoke it by pressing and holding three fingers initially, and I still have those fingers down, which is why I'm seeing that timeline up there at the top of the screen, at which point, I can now drag all three of my fingers to the left, in order to undo all those brush strokes, one stroke at a time. And then, if I want to bring them back, I would just press and hold those three fingers once again, and then drag over to the right, in order to bring back either all of my brush strokes, or just those that I want to keep.

All right now, I've mentioned how you can change the color of the brush, and this becomes interesting because there's a couple of ways to work. And so the first thing I'm gonna do, is tap on the color option, which in this case is a big yellowish, orange circle. And that is gonna bring up this picker window, which by default, is gonna show off a color wheel. And then you can drag inside that wheel, in order to change the hue, which is located out here on the perimeter or the saturation, that is how vivid the color is, from very vivid, on the outside, to sort of grayish, on the inside of the circle.

And you can also drag this slider right here, in order to change the brightness of the color. I'm gonna go with a bright red, let's say, just for the sake of demonstration. And then you wanna click inside the sketch to dismiss that window. And now I'll just go ahead and drag like so, in order to paint a big red brush stroke. And now I'm gonna tap on the color option, once again, in order to bring up the wheel, and I'll go ahead and select a shade of green, let's say this time, then I'll tap outside that window, and I will drag, once again, in order to create that brush stroke.

Now, this becomes interesting because at this point, I can recall a color, by tapping on that little color circle once again. And notice this wheel option, right here in the center above the actual color wheel, if I tap on it, then I can switch to RGB values instead, or I'll tap on RGB, and switch to history, and we'll see the history of the colors that I've used so far. I'm gonna go ahead and tap on that initial shade of yellow right there, and draw, yet another, brush stroke.

Now let's say what you really wanna do, and I'm just gonna paint the heck out of this thing, what you really wanna do is lift some other color from your artwork, you essentially want to eye drop it. In that case, go ahead and tap and hold on that color circle. And that will bring up this little color ring, there in the center of the sketch, and it's tempting to grab the very center of it and move it around, but that's not really how it works. All you need to do is tap on the color you want to lift, in order to move the ring to directly above it.

And so, notice as soon as I tap, the ring moves to just above that location. And so let's say I wanna just find some intermediate color, somewhere in the art work, I'll just go ahead and tap, let's say up here, for example, and then, assuming you like the color you see, on the top of the ring by the way, the bottom of the ring is showing you the previous color, the top of the ring is showing you the new one, then go down to the very bottom left corner of the screen, and tap OK. And that will go ahead and accept that new shade of red. And you can either accept it just by painting inside the window here, or, of course, you can modify it, by tapping on the color score, then switching from history to wheel, let's say, and then dragging that circle to a different location.

Then again, you can go ahead and tap inside your sketch, to make that window go away, and paint as many brush strokes as you like. All right now, obviously, that is a big huge mess, so what I'm gonna do is close this sketch by tapping on the word close, on the top left corner of the screen. And let's say I wanna create a new sketch inside of this same project. Now, of course, I went ahead and got rid of all those extra sketches at the beginning of the movie, but that's not a problem, because you can always create a new sketch, by tapping on this page icon, that has a little + sign inside of it, then I'll add a new sketch to a project, at which point you can enter that sketch, just by tapping inside the blank area, and then, of course, painting 'til your heart's content.

And that, my friends, is what I sincerely hope, is a thorough introduction to the exciting world of Adobe Sketch. If you're a member of Lynda.com, then I have a follow up movie, that I'm calling "More Fun, With Adobe Photoshop Sketch". And the idea is this is a pretty ambitious app, and I just want you to know how everything works. If you're waiting for next week, where I am gonna show you once again, inside sketch, how to take a photograph, and then trace it with the ink pen tool, in order to create this base piece of line art.

Deke's techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.