From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

861 Introducing Adobe Fresco for the iPad

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

861 Introducing Adobe Fresco for the iPad

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Today begins my multi-week look at an app called Adobe Fresco. I'll be showing it off on an iPad Pro, but it works on other tablets as well, and it's essentially the replacement for Adobe Sketch and Adobe Draw all wrapped up into one more capable and better looking package. Okay, so first, this is a pro level app, and this is what it looks like, by the way. Try to ignore the robot. He's just a good will artistic ambassador. Instead, notice that we have the tools over here on the left and the layers over here on the right. And so Fresco generates cloud based layered PSDC files that you can open and edit inside Photoshop running on the Mac or a PC. And actually, in a few specific ways, it's better than Photoshop. It offers a wide array of brush capabilities, as you about to see, and it has a better lasso tool. I know, that sounds like a minor thing but it's a really great lasso tool. I could go on and on. In fact, you know, I think I will. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here we are inside Adobe Fresco, running on an iPad Pro, and on first blast, it looks a lot like Photoshop running on the iPad. So, notice over here on the right hand side of the screen that we have a column of layers. If you want to hide the layers, then you tap on this little layers icon in the top right corner of the screen. And then, to bring the layers back, you go ahead and tap on that icon again. If you want to select a layer, you just go ahead and tap on its thumbnail. So for example, I'll tap on this guy right here, which is the third to bottom. Notice that it has a little blue outline around it, and then I can hide this guy by tapping on the eye icon over here on the right hand side of the screen. And then, to show the layer, I will again, tap on that eye. All right, now notice over here on the left hand side of the screen, that we have a vertical toolbox, starting with the pixel brushes. So notice if I tap this top tool icon, I can see a list of pixel brushes that are available to Fresco. And then, if I want to see all of them in their various categories, I'll tap on the word basic right there so that I can see these many categories of brushes. You can also create favorites if you like. And I'll show you how that works in just a moment. All right, so notice that you can go ahead and drag this menu so that it becomes a floating panel and notice if I tap on all, I can now see all the categories of brushes once again. If I want to dock this panel, then I can just go ahead and drag it over here to the top left corner of the screen. And then if I want to dismiss it, I would just tap on that X icon in the top right corner of the panel. All right, the other thing I want you to notice is this circle right here, which could be a little bewildering at first. It is the touch shortcut ring and it allows you to change the behavior of a handful of tools when you tap and hold on it. And we'll see what that looks like in just a moment. And then finally, you notice that we have a bunch of brush options down here at the bottom of the toolbox, including the ability to change the color of the brush. You can change the size by tapping on this guy. Or, if you want to dial in a specific size value, you tap and hold like so. Next we have the flow option, which controls how much paint is laid down in a single brush stroke. So it's analogous to the flow option inside Photoshop. It's deciding the opacity of every single dollop of paint, in other words. Next we have the smoothing option, so you can increase the smoothness of your brush strokes if you like. And then, you can tap this final icon in order to bring up additional brush settings. Now, if you want to divide these options off into their own panel, then you just go ahead and drag this little horizontal bar right here and then you can drop the panel anywhere you like. In my case, I'm just going to leave it as part of the vertical toolbox like so. All right, now that you have a rough sense for how Adobe Fresco is laid out, let me show you one way you might use it. I'm going to go ahead and tap on the home icon in the top left corner of the screen, and then, you would create a new document by tapping create new in the bottom left corner of the screen. However, I'm going to cheat a little bit and open this second document I've created in advanced called Template Bot right there. And then, I want you to notice that the middle layer is selected over there on the right hand side of the screen. And I'm going to tap on the settings icon and I'm going to change the opacity to just 10 so that I have some very translucent lines indeed. And now I'll go ahead and hide those properties. Then, I'll tap on the brush icon up there at the top of the vertical toolbox. I will tap on the ink group right there, and I'll select this third brush from the bottom, at least that's where it is right now, Grungy Inker. And if I want to turn that into a favorite, then I would just tap on the star, and now notice my favorites list includes Grungy Inker so I can come back to it anytime I like. All right, now I'll tap on the color icon right there and I want you to see to the left of the color wheel, we have a white circle and a black one. So you can very easily switch back and forth between the colors black and white. My flow is maxed out to a hundred and I've also cranked up my smoothing to 80, so presumably, I'll get some very smooth lines. Right now I'm going to create a new layer by tapping on the plus icon over here on the far right side of the screen. And I'm going to draw a vertical line going downward like so and I might go ahead and pinch out so that I'm zoomed out a little bit, so I can see the very bottom of my canvas. And now I'll go ahead and draw another vertical line at this location here. And then I'm going to draw a kind of smooth arc between the two, and I can go ahead and fill things out a little bit as well like so. And incidentally, if you want to erase as your painting, then all you do is tap and hold on that touch shortcut ring. Now I don't want it to be at this location, so I'm going to drag it over here. Once again, I'm always talking about this but I'm left handed, so I need to be able to touch and hold this ring with my right hand and now I'll just go ahead and paint. And notice that I am erasing with that same Grungy brush. So you're going to erase with the very same texture and edge detail as the brush you're working with. And then, I'll just go ahead and paint some of these details back in. And I'll go ahead and paint around the robot's head like so, and I'm actually using a few brush strokes in order to make sure that I have a kind of smooth outline going right here. And if you mess up, then you can always undo. You have multiple undo's in Fresco, just as you might expect, and you get to them by tapping the undo icon in the top right region of the screen up here. You also have a redo icon, by the way, if you want to redo the brush stroke, or you have gestures. It's a two finger tap to undo, and it's a three finger tap to redo. But, you've got to be pretty deliberate about it by the way, just bare that in mind. So I'll go ahead and two finger tap, didn't work, so instead, I'll tap the undo icon, which tends to be easier, in my opinion, than the shortcut. And now I'll just go ahead and paint up around the top of the robot's head like so. And then I'll just add a few details right here. I will draw a line like so, just to get a feel for where everything should be. The side of the head needs to come up and around. And I'll go ahead and paint some more and by the way, I am using an Apple pencil, but you don't have to. You can just use your finger if you would prefer. All right, I'm going to undo that brush stroke however and then I'll just go ahead and paint in some additional details like so. I want to make sure that we have a kind of big shoulder over here on the right hand side of the artwork. And I'm pinching out once again, just so that I can draw the top of the shoulder like so. And incidentally, if you want to rotate the canvas, then just do a two finger spin, like that. And that may give you a better access to your artwork. Just as you might, for example, rotate a piece of paper in order to better access those lines. And now I'm going to erase some of these details where the shoulder overlaps by not tapping and holding on that touch shortcut ring, but rather, I'm going to double tap on it in order to lock it down. And that way, I can just erase without having to press that icon. So you can lock it down, once again, just by double tapping on it. And now, I'll just go ahead and erase away a few of these details, like so. And I will erase down these lines. So those were just structural lines to make sure I had everything in the right place. And now, I'll double tap on that touch shortcut ring once again, in order to turn it off, and that will allow me to paint in this final shoulder brush stroke. All right, now I'm going to zoom in by once again, two finger pinching, really un-pinching I suppose. And now I'm going to draw this eye, and I'll drag around, like so, and then I'll draw the inside edge of the eye. And I want it to have a little bit of dimension, so I'll go ahead and drag this edge here and paint it in as well. And then I want to make sure I have a kind of other edge over here on the left hand side of that eye. And, I'm going to take this in just a little bit like so, and then I'll erase away those extra details by pressing it and holding on that touch shortcut ring and I'll go ahead and erase that detail away, and then I'll paint a little bit of it back. And I'll go ahead and paint in these bags for his eyes as well. Not sure that robots could even possibly have eye bags, but I'm going to go ahead and give 'em to him anyway. All right, now let's say I want to take that eye and I want to duplicate it. So I'm going to take the left eye and duplicate it to make the right eye. In that case, I probably want to go ahead and pop that eye to a new layer, which means I need to first select it. And you can select details inside of your artwork by tapping and holding on this kind of lasso icon right here. And so notice that we have a lasso as well as a selection brush, which isn't like the quick selection tool in Photoshop, it's just a dumb brush tool. You just paint in a selection outline, and then we've got the marquis as well. But, my favorite, because it has some tricks associated with it, is the lasso. And so notice, one thing you can do is just drag around. And so that dot indicates the beginning of your lasso. And so, if you come all the way around, you're going to close it like so. So you're just drawing a freeform lasso at this point. If you drag some more, you will add to the lasso. Notice I didn't come back to the beginning, so I have the option to close the lasso down here at the bottom of the screen. So I'll just tap on close. If you want to subtract from your selection, then you tap and hold on that touch shortcut ring once again, and then you go ahead and drag, and I'll drag all the way to the beginning, so that I can show you that I'm carving out a detail from that selection outline. All right, but I want to show you one more way to work. I'll tap deselect down here at the bottom of the screen, and I want you to notice the appearance of that lasso icon over there in the left hand toolbox. It is kind of half lasso and half a polygonal lasso, and that's because your other option is to just tap like so in order to set corners in a lasso edge. And now, I'll come all the way back to the beginning in order to finish off that selection. All right, now to pop this guy onto its own layer, the way you have to work as things stand now, is to tap on this dot, dot, dot icon, the ellipses, underneath the eye, and then you want to tap on cut selection right there. And now, go ahead and tap on the ellipses once again and choose paste selection, and that will put the eye on its own independent layer. Notice that its surrounded by a transformation boundary, which means that you can move it around if you want to, but I'm pretty happy with it's current location, and so I'll just tap done in the top right corner of the screen. All right now, if you want to, you can name the layer, by tapping on the slider icon right there. Then, tap on its current name, Pixel Layer, tap on the little X to get rid of it, and I'll just dial in Eye, and then tap done. All right, now I want to make a copy of this guy by tapping on the ellipses icon once again, and choosing duplicate layer this time around. And now, I want to move it to a different location, so we don't have one eye directly on top of the other, and you can do that by tapping on the little transform icon. This arrow right here above the lasso in the vertical toolbox, and that will go ahead and bring back the transformation boundary, at which point, I'll move the guy over to about this location. And I could scale it a little to make it slightly smaller by dragging on one of these corner handles, or you can drag this bottom handle right here in order to rotate. I don't want to do that however, so I'll undo that last modification and then I'll tap done in the top right corner of the screen. And we have another eye. All right, now I want to get rid of that gunk underneath the eye. So I'll switch back to this layer right here, the one below the first eye. And notice, if I tap again, I'm just discovering this right now, I bring up that same list of options that I saw when I tapped on the ellipses. All right now, I'll go ahead and press and hold on that touch shortcut ring. And the idea is, I want to erase. Problem is, I've got the lasso selected, so I'll just tap cancel lasso down at the bottom of the screen, and I'll switch back to my brush by tapping the brush icon up there at the top of the toolbox, press and hold on the touch shortcut ring, and go ahead and erase that extra garbage right there. All right now, another thing you can do with selections, regardless of how you create them, is paint inside of them. And so, to demonstrate that, I'll go ahead and paint in the mouth by first adding a new layer by tapping on that little plus icon and then, I'll go ahead and paint in this mouth shape, very roughly, as you can see right here. But now let's say I want to paint in the teeth inside that region. I don't want the teeth coming out at all. In that case, I'll go ahead and select my lasso tool again. Notice, if you press and hold in order to bring up that little fly out menu, one of your options is load last selection. So you can take advantage of that one, not going to do us any good, however. So instead, what I'm going to do, is just tap like so in order to set corners in my polygonal lasso, and I'll just go ahead and go all the way back to the beginning right here. At this point, I could just go ahead and tap close lasso at the bottom of the screen in order to close the selection with a straight segment. And now, I will once again, grab my brush tool at the top of the list, and notice now, if I paint way too far by the way. Can't really see, I'm starting up here at the eye and painting all the way down, but thanks to the fact I have a selection outline, I am painting exclusively inside that selection, which is just how things work inside of Photoshop itself. All right, now I'll tap deselect down here at the bottom of the screen, and I will do a quick two finger pinch in order to center my zoom. And that friends, is at least one way to use Adobe Fresco running on an iPad Pro. If you're a member of Linked In Learning, I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to paint aligned, half tone patterns once again, inside Adobe Fresco. If you're looking forward to next week, this is just the beginning. Truly, it gets better. Live brushes, forever wet watercolors, smeary textured oil paints. If you're a serious creative, it's about to get serious. Deke's Techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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