Adobe Fresco App Review
There are a lot of Art apps for teachers to use for their art classroom, but how can we know which one works best for our students? Today I will be reviewing Adobe Fresco, an app for digital painting. Adobe Fresco is one of the newest drawing and painting apps and the best part is that it is completely free. Students would not have to worry about not having enough money to buy the app, the only thing they would need is a cell phone, or Ipad which nowadays almost every student already have or if that is not the case the school can provide one as well. Another big thing about the app is that it is user friendly so even if the students are not very familiar with digital art or how technology works they would still be able to understand and create amazing artworks.
As for tools, this amazing app has three different brush tools which include pixel brushes, live brushes, and vector brushes in which you can adapt their thickness, color, smoothness and even ink flow to all of them. Pixel brushes use pixels, small units of squares, to create brush strokes, live brushes give the illusions of oil paint or watercolors which you can also blend together as if it is a real painting, and vector brushes create very flat and solid brush strokes to any scale size you want. Another very useful tool that adobe fresco has is layers which I truthfully love. Layers are a very useful tool for digital art, they are like stacked sheets of transparent paper which creates more depth to the painting. You can hide, add, organize or delete layers with adobe fresco very easily. An easy and informative assignment idea using this tool in adobe fresco for students to do is creating a line or contour drawing. By adding an image and creating a layer students would be able to trace the object or person in order to understand more about form. Another quick idea which I show in the example below is to draw shapes on top of the image in order for students to understand how to deconstruct or simplify big forms into shapes which would later help them draw things easily by not just drawing what they think they see but drawing what they are actually seeing.
Other tools that this app has are pixel erasers which are also in different sizes, smudge brushes, and a transform bottom which allows you to move and change size of anything even after you have already drawn it. For example, let's say that you draw an ocean with a bunch of fishes and at the end, you decided that you didn't like the position of one of your fishes, so you will press the transform bottom and as long as your fish is in a separate layer you can move it all around your canvas. Talking about canvases, at the beginning of your digital painting you have the option to use a screen size canvas or you can custom size your own so you can basically create a very long landscape and even a tiny little painting, is all up to the students choice and creativity.
Now everything has pros and cons, and I already talked about all of the pros which are definitely more than the cons but we still have to mention it. The only thing bad about adobe fresco that I can think of is that this app was created for apple products which means that it is not available for android users which is very sad. But again, apple is one of the biggest brands out there and most of the students have apple products but if there are students that owned android products I would use another very similar app for them called Adobe illustrator draw which is very similar to adobe fresco but not the exact thing. If I was in an art classroom my main art app for students to use would most definitely be adobe fresco and I will of course have a list of other similar apps like this one for my android users. Again, this app is user friendly, it has multiple different brushes with the illusion of a real painting and it also includes a lot more fun tools to explore like layers which are an amazing tool to create line and contour drawings like the example below.
There are a lot of Art apps for teachers to use for their art classroom, but how can we know which one works best for our students? Today I will be reviewing Adobe Fresco, an app for digital painting. Adobe Fresco is one of the newest drawing and painting apps and the best part is that it is completely free. Students would not have to worry about not having enough money to buy the app, the only thing they would need is a cell phone, or Ipad which nowadays almost every student already have or if that is not the case the school can provide one as well. Another big thing about the app is that it is user friendly so even if the students are not very familiar with digital art or how technology works they would still be able to understand and create amazing artworks.
As for tools, this amazing app has three different brush tools which include pixel brushes, live brushes, and vector brushes in which you can adapt their thickness, color, smoothness and even ink flow to all of them. Pixel brushes use pixels, small units of squares, to create brush strokes, live brushes give the illusions of oil paint or watercolors which you can also blend together as if it is a real painting, and vector brushes create very flat and solid brush strokes to any scale size you want. Another very useful tool that adobe fresco has is layers which I truthfully love. Layers are a very useful tool for digital art, they are like stacked sheets of transparent paper which creates more depth to the painting. You can hide, add, organize or delete layers with adobe fresco very easily. An easy and informative assignment idea using this tool in adobe fresco for students to do is creating a line or contour drawing. By adding an image and creating a layer students would be able to trace the object or person in order to understand more about form. Another quick idea which I show in the example below is to draw shapes on top of the image in order for students to understand how to deconstruct or simplify big forms into shapes which would later help them draw things easily by not just drawing what they think they see but drawing what they are actually seeing.
Other tools that this app has are pixel erasers which are also in different sizes, smudge brushes, and a transform bottom which allows you to move and change size of anything even after you have already drawn it. For example, let's say that you draw an ocean with a bunch of fishes and at the end, you decided that you didn't like the position of one of your fishes, so you will press the transform bottom and as long as your fish is in a separate layer you can move it all around your canvas. Talking about canvases, at the beginning of your digital painting you have the option to use a screen size canvas or you can custom size your own so you can basically create a very long landscape and even a tiny little painting, is all up to the students choice and creativity.
Now everything has pros and cons, and I already talked about all of the pros which are definitely more than the cons but we still have to mention it. The only thing bad about adobe fresco that I can think of is that this app was created for apple products which means that it is not available for android users which is very sad. But again, apple is one of the biggest brands out there and most of the students have apple products but if there are students that owned android products I would use another very similar app for them called Adobe illustrator draw which is very similar to adobe fresco but not the exact thing. If I was in an art classroom my main art app for students to use would most definitely be adobe fresco and I will of course have a list of other similar apps like this one for my android users. Again, this app is user friendly, it has multiple different brushes with the illusion of a real painting and it also includes a lot more fun tools to explore like layers which are an amazing tool to create line and contour drawings like the example below.