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

867 Vector brushes in Adobe Fresco

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

867 Vector brushes in Adobe Fresco

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, welcome to "Deke's Techniques". As regular viewers may recall, we've been sneaking a peek at a new mobile app from Adobe called Fresco, which allows you to create and organize artwork. It supports multiple layers, just like Photoshop, and in a few ways, it's even better. For example, today I'll introduce you to Fresco's vector brushes, which are found nowhere inside Photoshop, and are analogous to the Blob Brush in Illustrator. Why in the world would that be useful? Because vectors scale to any size you like, "But wait a moment", you say. "Can you paint those vectors smoothly, "or fill them with color, "and maybe even paint perfectly straight, "pressure-sensitive lines in any angle that you like?" Well, gee whiz, it's just a Version 1.0 product. Of course you can! Here, let me show you how all of it works. All right, so here I am inside of Adobe Fresco, and notice that we have a couple of layers over here on the far right side of the screen. We've got this pixel-based watercolor layer, and then we have this vector-based layer. Now, they're both identified by badges. Here we have a tiny little pixel-based circle, and then for the vector-based layer, we have a smooth vector-base circle. Now, they're easier to see if you tap and hold on the little plus sign on the far right side of the screen, and so there we have bigger versions of the badges. We have this pixel-base circle right here, and then below it, he have this vector-base circle. Now, if you were to select one of those guys, you would create either a pixel-based or vector-base layer. If you just tap on the plus sign, however, notice that you get a new layer with no badge on it, and that's Fresco's way of showing you that you haven't decided what kind of layer it is. You'll decide the moment you start painting, and so I'm going to move over to the left-hand toolbox here, and I'm going to move down to the fourth icon, which is actually the third tool, and I'll tap and hold on it, and that will show you a list of vector-base brushes. I'm going to stick with this first guy, Basic Round, and then I'll tap on the Color icon, and I'll change it to black by tapping on that black circle. Notice that I've set the size to 30, and I'm starting with a Smoothing value of 50. All right, now notice if I just start in painting like so, then not only am I going to create a spiral in this case, but I've also identified this layer over here on the right-hand side of the screen as a vector-base layer, as indicated by that tiny blue circular badge. Now, the problem is, I'm getting very lumpy results, and that's a function of my smoothing value, so I'm just going to tap the Undo icon up here in the top right region of the screen. I'll tap on that Smoothing icon once again, and I'll crank it all the way, let's say up to 100, at which point you'll get much smoother results. Now, you will get a little bit of delay as you paint, so that's just something to bear in mind. All right, now I want to show you a couple of other things. For the moment, just to make things less distracting, I'm going to switch to the next layer down, and I'm going to tap on this little Settings icon in the top right corner of the screen, and I'm going to take the Opacity value down to 10. All right, now I'll tap on that spiral layer once again so I can show you a couple of different ways to draw straight lines. One is to tap on the little Settings icon up here in the top right corner of the screen, and then tap on App Settings, and tap on the word Experimental. Now, because this is an experimental feature, it may very well change in the future, so it may look different in your version of the software, but I'm going to go ahead and turn on this one and only option: Hold for straight line, and then I'll close this window, and now notice I'm just going to drag with my finger here. I'll draw a very small line, and then just hold at the end of it, and now if I begin dragging it, you can see that it becomes a long, straight line. Now, we'll lengthen even more, because my finger, as it turns out, is way up in the top left corner of the screen, so if I now release, Fresco is going to complete that line like so. All right, that's one way to work. Another is to draw a kind of arcing line and then hold at the end of it, after which point if you start dragging around you will transform that line. That is to say you're scaling and rotating it. All right, so that's one option available to you. I'm going to go ahead and undo that guy. Perhaps a more reliable way to work, however, is to tap this Ruler icon in the bottom right corner of the screen, which will bring up this kind of rectangular marquee. Now you can do a two-finger drag in order to rotate that marquee and move it into the desired location, let's say here, and now when you drag with your finger or a stylus, you're going to end up painting a straight line on either side of that marquee, so where you drag is up to you. And then, when you're done, just go ahead and tap that ruler icon once again to dismiss the marquee. All right, I don't really want those lines, so I'll go ahead and undo them by tapping the Undo icon a couple of times, and then I'm going to go back to that original vector-base layer and crank its opacity back up to 100. All right, now let's say I want to move the right eye to a different location, her left eye, of course. Well, if this were Illustrator, or even Photoshop, you could click on the eye with an arrow tool, but currently, Fresco doesn't have such a thing, so what you need to do instead is go ahead and grab one of the selection tools. I am going to stick with the lasso tool right here, and now I'll just go ahead and tap around the eye in order to set these points in this polygonal selection outline, and I'll go ahead and tap that first point in order to completely encompass the eye, and then I'll go ahead and tap on this little Arrow tool that's directly above the Lasso tool on the left-hand side of the screen in order to gain access to this transformation boundary, and now I can drag the selection to any location that I like. I'm going to move it to, let's say right about there. Maybe a little farther down, and a bit inward as well, just so that she appears to be looking at us. All right, as soon as you're done, just go ahead and tap the word Done in the top right corner of the screen, and that will set down the selection, after which point I'll just tap de-select at the bottom of the screen in order to de-select my artwork. All right, now I'd like to fill in my line art with color, and I'm going to do that by switching to the Fill tool here, the little paint bucket over there in the vertical toolbox, and now all you need to do is select a color, and so I'll just go ahead and tap on the Color icon and I'll tap on the HSB sliders this time because I want to dial in some specific values, so I'll change the Hue value to 30, and then I'll tap in the Saturation value, change it to 60 this time around, and I'll tap inside the Brightness value and change it to 80, and now all you have to do is tap inside the area that you want to fill, so I'll start with her face, and then I'll fill in her neck like so, and then I'll go ahead and tap on that color icon again, and I'll take the Saturation value not quite that high, and you can see why it's preferable if you want to get a specific value to just tap inside the field, because otherwise your view of that field is blocked by this big dollop right here, this upside-down teardrop, but in any event, I'm going to change the Brightness value to 50, and then I'll just tap inside these regions of hair in order to fill them with this shade of brown, and then finally I'll go ahead and dial in yet another color, so I'm going with a Hue value of 40 this time around, a Saturation value of 70, and now I'll change the Brightness to 100%, and then I'll just go ahead and tap inside these remaining regions like so, and finally, I'll go ahead and select the watercolor layer, and I'll tap the Eyeball icon on the right side of the screen in order to turn it off, and now notice if I zoom in to any degree I want to, that my vector-based outlines remain super smooth. All right, I'm going to go ahead and switch to the full screen mode by tapping on this double arrow icon in the top right corner of the screen, and then I'll center my zoom with a quick two-finger pinch, and that is how you work with vector-based brushes here inside Adobe Fresco. Pretty great, huh? So great that if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie in which we take the artwork that we've created so far, and we open it in Photoshop. The real Photoshop, running on a Mac or PC, which is exciting, because Photoshop interprets a Fresco vector layer as a scalable vector graphic, or SVG, embedded into a Smart Object that it can then hand off to Illustrator. Do you see what's happening? Adobe is devising a creative system, one that works with all of our devices all of the time, so that everything you ever create is at your beck and call, whether you're at home, at the office, on a subway, in a lift, at the barber's, in a hotel room, or off on your maiden voyage into deep space. For all I know, you're on an asteroid right now, sketching what you see in Fresco so that when you get home, you can refine that sketch in Photoshop minutes before you fly off to your next mission. "Deke's Techniques", each and every week, keep watching.

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