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

862 Adobe Fresco paints halftone patterns

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

862 Adobe Fresco paints halftone patterns

- [Instructor] All right, now I'm going to show you how to paint halftone patterns inside Adobe Fresco. And as you can see represented in blue here on screen these halftone dots grow and shrink depending on the amount of pressure you apply, and they always exactly align with each other. And this is just one example of the incredible collection of brushes included along with this app. All right, so I'll tap the Home icon in the top left corner of the screen in order to switch to my home view, and then I'll open this guy right here called Bot_brushtrokes, which includes the white version of the robot. So we don't have any halftone dots at this point. And now I'll make sure the top layer in the stack is selected on the right-hand side of the screen, and I'll tap the plus icon in order to add a new layer. And incidentally, if you're not seeing your layers, you need to tap this little layer icon in the top right corner of the screen like so. All right, now I'll tap the brush icon at the top of the vertical toolbox, and I'm going to switch out of ink right here by tapping on this little arrow. And while I invite you to take a look at all of the brushes, go ahead and experiment with any one of them inside of this list, I'm going to open the comics group. And notice that in addition to crosshatch, I have a bunch of halftone brushes. The one I'll be using is Halftone4, and so I'll go ahead and tap its star in order to add it to my list of favorites. All right now, I'm looking for blue halftone dots, so I'm going to tap this color icon right here, and notice that you can drag inside of the square field in order to change the brightness of your color as well as its saturation. And you can drag in this outside ring in order to change the hue. If you want to dial things in numerically, then you can twirl open HSB Sliders as we're seeing here. The exact color is not all that important just as long as it looks nice and blue like so. And then notice that I've cranked the size value up to 150. I've set the flow to 50, so we have a pretty low flow going at this point. And I don't need any smoothing. All right, so I'm just going to ahead and hide that slider, and I will paint inside of this layer in order to paint in this halftone dot. And notice as I bear down I get bigger dots as well as a bigger brushstroke, and as I let up I get lighter dots like so. But if I were to paint a second brushstroke, notice that things align perfectly, so each and every brushstroke is going to align with the previous one. Now this is a little sloppy for my taste, so what I want to do is mask my brushtroke inside selections. So let's just go head and undone those guys by tapping on the undo icon a couple of times, and then I will select the lasso tool right here. It's going to be my best bet. And now I'll just go ahead and tap around the edge of the robot's head in order to lay down points in a freeform polygon like so. And it's not necessary that you get it exactly right, although I am going to try to do a reasonably good job. Now in addition to tapping, you can drag in order to add a freeform edge to your selection, if you so desire. So you can combine dragging along with tapping. And now I'll just go head and finish off the selection like so, and I'm going to add the edge to the right-hand shoulder as well, so over here in the right area of the artwork I'm just going to tap down here, drag around the bottom like so, and then I'll tap my way back up until I've finished things off. All right, so I have these two regions selected because every time that you just tap or drag with the lasso you were adding to the previous selection outline. And now I'll switch back to the brush up here at the top of the toolbox, and I'll just paint in. And notice that the selection outline is nicely masking my brushstroke. Now this isn't a layer mask, though that is possible inside Fresco. Rather we're just masking things on the fly. Now I ended up pressing a little bit too hard there. You can erase with the halftone brush if you want to by tapping and holding that touch shortcut ring and then brushing like so, but they you're going to get these weird hollow dots which probably isn't what you want. So, I'm just going to go ahead and undo my way out there. And I'm going to try to spin my artwork a little bit so I can paint along this edge right here. So I'm just going to paint lightly out in this region like so in order to fill things in down into the shoulder as well so that I have these pretty light dots. And I'm going to pinch a little bit to pin my artwork like so, and then I'm going to drag a little more harshly, that is I'm applying more pressure with my stylus here, with my Apple pencil, although as I think I've mentioned you can just go ahead and drag with your finger if you prefer which might actually work pretty good for this. But I'm just going to go ahead and paint in, and I'm trying paint multiple brushstrokes so that I end up with some nice smooth transitions. And so that ends up looking pretty good, I'm thinking, although I'm going to go ahead and a paint some more at which point you can see that my halftone dots aren't really aligning any more. And that is a function of the fact that I rotated my artwork on the fly so that my be something to watch out for. However, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to go ahead and paint inside my selected regions as you see me doing right here. And I'm going to darken things up quite a bit. All right, now I'll tap deselect down here at the bottom of the screen in order to deselect the artwork, and now I'm going to select a different region in the robot's face this time around, but tapping and holding on the lasso, and I'll go ahead and grab the final selection tool, which is the elliptical marquee, and I will drag inside of this eye in order to select it. And then I'll drag inside the other eye in order to add it to the selection. If by by the way you wanted to create a circle instead of an ellipse, you would tap and hold on the touch shortcut ring and then drag like so. That's not what I want, however, so I'll just go ahead and undo that brushstroke. And now I'll switch back to the lasso tool by selecting it from the Flyout menu, and I'll just tap up here around this region of the face. And so I'm trying to protect the eye right there, as you can see that is the outside ring of the eye. And then I'll just kind of paint up in to the head like so, and then down here and around this side of the eye as well. And you can see that I'm just selecting about halfway into the face. And I'll go ahead and finish off that lasso, and now I'll just tap around the edge of this right-hand shoulder right here, and I might select all the way around it like so, as you're seeing me do. And notice when I'm zoomed out I can tap actually outside of the canvas. That is what passes for the pasteboard inside this app. And I'm going to select around this little detail as well, that little triangle right there. And now I'll switch back to the brush tool, and I'll go ahead and paint inside of this edge over here on the right-hand shoulder. And notice that I'm painting pretty hard at first, but then I'm letting up. Actually right there I didn't let up, and the moral of the story is paint a lot of small brushstrokes. Don't paint a big brushstroke because then when you have to undo it you undo all of that work. I'm going to try to learn this lesson and paint a lot of little brushstrokes like so. Now I'll paint in a darker edge over at this location, and then paint very lightly around here. All right, now I'm going paint inside that little triangle. That's way to hard so I'll undo that, try again. And now I'll paint inside of the face like so, and then I'll let up in order to let the halftone dots get lighter. I'll paint a little bit more inside that eye, and I'll paint a little bit more inside of this eye as well. And now I'll tap deselect down there at the bottom of the screen in order to deselect my artwork. And now I can just paint freeform inside the head like so in order to add a little more shading at this location. I'm going to add some shading down here as well, that's going into the chest, as well a little bit over here on the right side of the left-hand shoulder and maybe down this edge as well and over into this region of the chest. All right now, I want to make this area a little bit darker, so I'm going to paint it and then lighten up. And actually you may also notice that we're seeing opaque halftone dots that are covering up the black. That is not what I want, so I'll tap on this little settings icon in the top right corner of the screen, and I'll change the blend mode to multiply, and notice now we're seeing those black brush strokes show through. And then I'll go ahead and switch my brush back to my other favorite, grungy inker, and then I'll go ahead and hide those brushes and I'll tap and hold on that touch shortcut ring and I'll go ahead and erase those halftone dots. And then I'll do a quick pinch in order to zoom out. So obviously I lied a little bit when I said your halftone dots are always going to line up with each other. They're apparently only going to line up with each other as long as you don't rotate your canvas. And so that is possibly something to bear in mind, but it does give you a sense for the rich array of pixel-based brushes available to you inside Adobe Fresco.

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