14 - Five Months of Oil Painting Experience with Adobe Fresco on Windows

General / 07 June 2021

It has been about five months since I first attempted oil painting in Adobe Fresco using Live Oils. It has been a fun ride to learn digital painting from traditional oil painters. What have I discovered so far?

Mixing paint with Live Oils and Mixer Brushes

Live Oils are the best for mixing color because they stay wet forever unlike real oils. I can even control how thick or thin (Flow), how well the paint will mix (Mix), and only paint with dry brush (Secondary brush mode).

The color wheel on the top right corner was mixed by Live Oils. Mixers Brushes, on the other hand, help add more natural and textured looks to my brush strokes.

Notes: You can buy paper or canvas textures as png or jpeg files online to use as a background for your painting. This is way less boring than looking at a bright white computer screen.

Essential Shortcut Keys for my Fresco + Photoshop workflow

The cool thing about using Fresco on Windows is that I can use an external Wacom Remote control for shortcut keys to speed up my workflow.

My current Shortcuts for Wacom ExpressKey Remote Control have been updated so that I can go back and forth between Adobe Fresco and Photoshop. That's why I even changed the shortcuts in Photoshop to match ones in Fresco. These shortcuts have worked well for me. You may want to change them to suit your own workflow.

Fresco is saved in the Adobe Creative Cloud as a PSDC file. You cannot see it on your Windows files, but it appears in Cloud Documents in Photoshop. That is why I can paint in Fresco, then go to Photoshop to paint or adjust something, and then go back to Fresco to continue painting there again.

Notes:

  • Fresco doesn't allow to change shortcut keys at the time I wrote this blog post (June 07, 2021).
  • These Fresco shortcuts for Flip V, Flip H and Quick Export does not work in Photoshop. Since I work in Fresco 90% of the time, this works for me.
  • Fresco doesn't have a shortcut for Smudge. Luckily, I can assign (N) as the key for Smudge Tool in Photoshop.
  • Live Brushes (H) in Fresco is also the key I assigned for Mixer Brush in Photoshop.
  • Brush Tool in Photoshop is replaced with the key for Pixel Brushes (P) in Fresco. Now, I just press (P) to use Pixel Brushes in both apps.
  • The tilde key (`) is very handy in Fresco. Pressing and hold it to go to secondary brush mode which allows you to Paint with Dry brush in Live Oils, or Add water in Live Watercolors, or Erase with brush in Pixel Brushes. In Photoshop, pressing and hold this tilde button while using a Brush Tool will allow you to erase with that very brush! This is super cool feature that you guys should get used to.

Oil Painting Practice

Let's have a look at some of my recent Oil Painting Practice so far! It felt great when I combined all the power of Live Oils, Mixer Brushes, Smudge in Fresco with Mixer Brushes and Editing Tools in Photoshop to improve the quality of my painting.

I hope that if you want to try oil painting digitally someday, then Live Oils and Mixer Brushes in Adobe Fresco may be a great start for you too. If you need help, Kyle T. Webster has a clear instruction about Live Oils and how it works in the YouTube video below.

Thanks for reading and have a lovely day, everyone!