Digital Drawings with Adobe Fresco and Apple iPad

December 2021 · 2 minute read

I use my iPad heavily for note taking and it is really great in my opinion, but for some reason I never really thought about using it for painting/drawing as well. Over the Christmas holidays we met an old friend of my fiancé again, who is a graphical designer. She showed us some of the paintings and drawings that she did on her iPad using Adobe Creative Suite and they were absolutely stunning. She even had a special clip-on screen for her iPad to mimic the roughness of paper.

Adobe’s Creative Suite is amazing, but quite expensive if you are not a professional artist or a student. Fortunately, Adobe offers a slimmed down painting/drawing app called Adobe Fresco that is free to use with the exception of a view premium features.

When we came back home the first thing I did was install Fresco and give it a spin and I have to say, I really liked it! After using it for a couple of days I keep thinking: How come I never thought about using digital tools for painting/drawing before?

Painting/drawing is almost to easy using digital tools:

I used to draw and sketch infrequently in the past, but I can see starting to do it more often simply because I usually do not pack my sketch book or my pencils/paints, but I have my iPad with me more or less constantely. Also the option to experiment without having to fear that the painting is going to be botched is huge in my opinion. I am quite conservative when I draw/paint with non-erasable ink/color, because hours worth of work can be lost quite quickly (maybe lost is too strong a word, but you get the meaning).

Moreover, there are lots of amazing tutorials showing you how to leverage Fresco’s tools :)

I started out with two paintings, a mountain range from my home town Lienz in Tyrol:

Spitzkofel

and my most favorite fictional character:

Stitch

Looking forward to hopefully spending more time painting/drawing again in the future :)

PS: I know this post is probably super obvious for every artist who has not lived in a cave over the last couple of years, but for me it was eye opening. Quite funny how long it took me too realize this.