Watercolors - Fresco Tutorial

- [Instructor] If you've ever wanted to enjoy water color painting with the power of undo and move and transform, well now you can, thanks to Fresco's water color live brushes. Live brushes are the category of brush found here on the left where you see a little drop of water next to my brush icon. If I tap on that, I have the water colors or the oils. So let's take a look at the water colors now. Here I have the water color wash flat brush selected. And with my brush controls you'll see that on the bottom left we have two water drops. I'll tap on that. What this allows me to do is say how much water I'm using at any one time with the brush. And above it with the flow, we're now controlling how much paint is in the brush. So a little bit of paint and a lot of water will give you a light wash. Let's see what that looks like. I've got the water flow up to 100. My flow is pretty low. So not much color, but lots and lots of water. And you can see how it's blending and flowing on the canvas. Just like that. As I zoom in you'll even be able to see some of those beautiful water color blooms you would get with real water colors, including dark edges around where the water is pushing the paint to the edge of the shape that I've painted. Now let's increase the flow. Still using a lot of water. Look at the difference as I start to put the paint down. Much richer color, much darker, and that water's going to push that paint a lot farther a lot faster. So these are the exact controls you would have with real water colors, only they're in a digital environment, which of course means I can tap with my fingers just to undo like that and start over again. So don't worry about making mistakes when you're using these. One thing I want to show you that's interesting is blending colors together for a variegated wash. I'll put some color down here. And let's select a yellow. Now if you know anything about color theory, yellow and red will make orange. And look how beautiful that is. You get a smooth transition from the yellow into the red and there's the orange. Now if I decide to save this file, and come back to it a month from now, the paint will still be wet. There are times when you're going to want the paint to be dry so you can have different effects. Well there are different ways to achieve this. One way is simply to add another layer and then to paint on top. Simple as that. I don't have to worry about that paint mixing with the paint that's underneath. And I can work in a nondestructive way, and keep my layers intact and keep them wet if I want. But if I'm really ready to dry a layer, I can actually do that by tapping on the layer actions. Right here, these three dots for this layer. At the very bottom you'll see that the option to dry the layer is present. I'll tap on that. What's interesting about using the dry layer feature and then painting on the same layer again is that the colors will be recognized, but you're not going to get any blending with the edges of the shape that you paint. What I mean by that is as I paint with blue out here on the left, that's about the saturation you're going to get. But watch what happens as I paint over the area that I've already painted before. Now even though the edges of my shape are sharp, you can see that the blue and the yellow have mixed to make green. And the blue and the red have mixed to make purple. So this is an interesting feature you can use where it's essentially just like real water color where you let an area dry, you paint over it, and you take advantage of the transparency of the medium to have other colors come through. And just like a real water colorist you can even use pure water with no pigment whatsoever. If I open the color wheel and tap on the transparent circle to the bottom right, right here. Now what I've got is water in my brush and no pigment, and I'm still retaining the same amount of flow and the same saturation of the water as what was there before. So here I've got the water set quite high. I'll lower it a little bit. Lower my flow. And I'll paint into the blue area here on the left. And look what's happening. I'm just taking water and pulling that color out into the canvas, which means I could even reactivate areas that were previously dry. Now that's some pretty powerful stuff.