Adobe Fresco Time Lapse Drawing Tutorial

How's it going? Today I'm going to be walking you through a speed drawing, sped up time-lapse video of me illustrating this art character. I started drawing the character. I was thinking I was going to put it on my website, but any time I get the, the delusion to have one of these characters on my website, I start to think it's not professional enough and I'll probably just end up leaving it in my Adobe Fresco graveyard. But I figured I'd just roll the camera and talk you through my entire process here. So if you're thinking about using Adobe Fresco or you want to learn some character design tips, this, this video should hopefully give you one or two. You can see now I am drawing with— let's see, what pen did I use for this? I used for the sketch— I went in the sketching in Adobe Fresco on my iPad, I used the pencil. I don't know why I needed to search or think about that for so long. It is just the pencil. And if you watch my other videos, you know that I like to sketch in blue. I don't know why. It just tells my brain that this is not a permanent thing and that these are all just tests and I don't need to be too perfect. At this point, I'm tilting the character around because I'm trying to get a realistic— what do you say? I guess you could call it a line of action. But really, I just want to make it feel like the feet are catching the heart's weight on the ground. And later on in the video, I use a reference to design the feet from Imaginary Friends, which I think has some of the best character designs around. So I bring in one of their shoes and I trace it and then sort of create my own. You can see I'm using the pencil tool over this. I'm a big fan of tracing things that you like. I think this writes things to your memories. It's sort of like learning a cover song on the guitar. That's the way that it becomes fun for you and you can see a little progress and see something made and see how it's professionally made. And then later on, after you do that more and more, you eventually, eventually turn that into your own thing. I would never trace anything and put it out and say, this is my own design, or try to sell anything of anybody else's. But the way I learned to draw when I was little is I would take, um, this card magazine, which would tell you the prices of football cards called Beckett Magazine. And I would take the COVID and either rip the COVID off or rip the page off and put it up on a TV. And then put a piece of paper over that, and then the line— the light would shine through, and I would trace the artwork or the photograph or the illustration on the COVID And that's, that's really how I started to learn how to draw, and it got me excited about drawing. So I think tracing is a really cool and fun way to learn something. I actually, as long as I've been drawing, after tracing these feet and putting them on this drawing, I'm not pretending they're my style by any means, but I'm just like happy and proud of them because it's a different way to draw feet. And I find I get stuck in my own ways of drawing. And anytime I can incorporate something else that I admire into my drawing, it's sort of a nod to that artist or that illustrator and freshens up my drawings. So I'm going to keep these shoes in there because I don't plan on doing anything with this drawing commercially. Commercially. Is that a word? Commercially. But yeah, it was, it was fun to do. So I'm going to keep them in there and pretend they're my own for, for the day. So I have this drawing process. I'm working. I'm still working on making it a little bit snappier. I-S-I-C-S-H. It's ideas, sketches, inks, colors, shadows, and highlights. That's the rough process that I use to draw any of my drawings, and it's easy to get drawing and try to work towards a final product and try to come up with the ideas as you go, and that definitely happens. About 20% of this drawing, or maybe even more than that, is improvised. But if you have a process of, of how you draw every single time, I find that it's much easier to take an idea to completion if you follow this process, almost like putting it in a machine. And then that process just takes care of turning that idea and trying to validate that idea. If you just start to wing it, you start to sketch, throw some lines and some colors in there, it's easier to get off track, and then you get lost in the details and the weeds rather than zooming out and focusing on the full project. Um, actually in this video, if I slowed it down, you would see that I do add some colors in before I complete my inks. And that's because, uh, sometimes on days that I don't feel like drawing, I need to create something that dangles a carrot in front of my face and it, it lets me see that this is going to be a fun drawing at the end. I'm actually going to get something out of putting this time in. And for me, it was creating the color in this character's mouth, the inside of it, because I saw the Doodles is coming out with a cartoon and they put aqua and purple inside the characters' mouths. And I thought, wow, I got to try that. That's, that's so cool. Usually I'm just putting like a dark gray or dark red in people's mouths or in the characters' mouths. And I want to change things up. I just want to— sometimes I look around at other drawings and other art styles and I just want to incorporate exactly what they do. It's like wearing a new outfit or finding a new style. It just helps keep my drawing and everything fresh. It just keeps it interesting for me. So I keep coming back and doing more. So I have to apologize because the colors in this video are off. I have no idea how to record an iPhone video and then bring it into Adobe Premiere or even onto my Mac without the colors not looking like they're from 1942. So let's just pretend that this was filmed in the '40s before internet and videos existed. So, um, yeah, so I, as I was working on this, I just, I thought to myself that I gotta change this belt buckle up. And I find myself just flying through some drawings and not giving every little thing too much thought. And then if you do that, it all adds up and it's sort of a drawing with 20% thought and 80% pieces just thrown together. So I thought to myself, you know, I'm going to really focus on this belt buckle. And as I watch this video and record this voiceover, I could easily go back and redo that belt buckle. I think it looks absolutely terrible, but that's just the artist's mind and it's never good enough. And I'm pretty happy with that. Look at how washed out this video is. I got to try to correct the colors. This is absolutely nuts. At one point I thought about deserting the Imaginary Friends sneakers, and I just thought to myself, you know, I'm like an hour into this drawing and I don't think I'm gonna have the energy to re-concept up the sneakers, and then I would just not finish the drawing. So stuck with it. I'm pretty happy with it. Call me out if you think I'm just biting off their style, which I absolutely am. Handy feature in Adobe Fresco is selecting all layers, merging them together, or creating groups. I'm a huge fan of that. So now I exported out the PNG as a high-resolution file and brought it over to Procreate because I'm going to add some luminance in the background here. These brushes, they're just in the, in the brush tab under luminance. Nothing fancy, should come with your Procreate. And I did a few layers here. I did one layer over top and turned it to overlay or soft light, something like— I can't really see what I set there— and added some noise to it. So I wanted this play button to be glowing, and then I smudged the light around a little bit and added some, um, sparkles coming off of it, some oversized sparkles that sort of make no sense. I thought they were pretty cool though. So the end of the drawing is always about details. I should probably add that in my process: ideas, sketch, ink, color, shadows, highlights, and details. The details are absolutely the icing on the cake and the reward that you give yourself for building up a character or drawing through structure, through experimentation, and figuring out what works. At the end, you get to add all the little details. Don't go too heavy on the details because you may find that they're just not needed. Simplicity always wins. Simplicity and clarity are number one in my book. And now I'm getting to the point where I'm wrapping up the video. I am adding some texture in the background. You can pause the video if you can catch that. A little bit of noise, a little bit of halftone pattern, I believe. And that's it. That wraps up my heart character. Thank you for watching.