Fresco – Pavvy Designs

The latest stylus and touch devices, like iPad Pro, are totally ready for modern painting design and art. To keep pace with it, Adobe Fresco brings together the world’s largest brush collection with AI-powered new technologies to deliver a natural painting and drawing experience. For artists, illustrators, animators, sketchers, and anyone who want to take the essence joy of drawing and painting.

For those who have forgotten art history, fresco (‘fresh’ in Italian) is a painting technique that has been used for centuries all over the world. Even it’s hardly to find an empty wall or ceiling to show your art talent, people always prefer working with Wacom tablets on the desktop over drawing on tablets like the iPad Pro. That’s why Adobe set out to make Adobe Fresco to empower such spontaneous creativity.

With an oil Live Brush in Adobe Fresco, you can slather on a thick coat of paint and see the ridges and brush strokes that give the painting dimension. And you can mix different oil colors together to create a varied swirl of color that no digital color wheel could ever provide.

Adobe Fresco’s has quite simple and intuitive UI, which is similar to the upcoming Photoshop for iPad beta. There are tools like brushes, paint bucket, move / transform, and lasso on the left, and the layers panels with blend modes like multiply, color burn, and screen on the right.

The Bottom Line

Adobe Fresco will officially release in late 2019, first on iPad and then other platforms. It works well on any iPad with Pencil support, but you’ll get more details on the iPad Pro.

A great fan of Procreate app, I was also curious about Adobe’s app for the iPad. They announced the release of Photoshop for the iPad over a year ago, and since then we got almost no news about their elaborations for mobile devices tooled for professional creators and artists. Until today actually, when there are only a few months left before the release of Adobe Fresco (ex-Project Gemini, introduced at Adobe MAX 2018).

Built for the latest stylus and touch devices, Adobe Fresco brings together the world’s largest brush collection with revolutionary new technology to deliver a natural painting and drawing experience. For artists, illustrators, animators, sketchers, and anyone who wants to discover — or rediscover — the joy of drawing and painting.

Whereas Photoshop and Illustrator are currently Adobe’s major tools for drawing and designing, Fresco is marketed as a program which provides the option to work in both vector and raster. It means a creator is free to switch between pixel and vector brushes, or even combine them, which has never been realized in Adobe software before.

Thanks to access to the Creative Cloud library, the app now features thousands of your favourite and most frequently used brushes, color palettes and other resources. And since Adobe Fresco supports all popular formats, you can easily export your projects from one app to another.

Both pixel and vector brushes, and new interface

The hugest and probably main innovation isn’t about combining two formats in a single app though. Instead, Adobe brings live brushes, which use Adobe Sensei’s AI platform to produce realistic watercolor and oil paint strokes. By ‘realistic’ I imply the very tangible magic normally possible on paper. Watercolors spread over, oil paint layers obtain true-to-life volume and texture — have you ever worked with anything like this?

Another feature that predetermines your love (or interest at least) is the intuitive UI, familiar to Adobe users and yet totally different. You will find present a lasso tool, paint bucket, layer masks — but no magic wand, gradients, clipping masks or text tool which has been recently added on Procreate. In return, Adobe Fresco features Touch shortcuts and gesture controls. Depending on how (and how many times) you tap on the layer, you can toggle visibility, undo and redo features. Or if you can double-tap the apple pencil to change the color quickly.

Artworks created in Adobe Fresco

Adobe Fresco’s launch is scheduled for the end of this year. The free app will be available on the App Store, and will work with iPad Pro, the 2019 iPad mini, and the iPad Air. However, a few lucky folks have already received early access to Adobe Fresco and are now fully involved in its creative processes.