Author: Caryn

Last week’s prompt was “xray”. So many possibilities. I admit I waited a week to see this week’s prompt to narrow the field: “soar”. Hm. The consensus in the household was that combining the two necessitates a drawing of an xray of a bird. My eldest, when asked to name a bird, said albatross. So here is my rendition of a radiograph of an albatross! I used a picture of an albatross skeleton as a guide, and used pixel brushes with white to sketch the xray. It helps to think of drawing the shadows, but with light, to get an xray effect (or thinking where the bone would be thickest). Dropping in a black background completes the illusion.

This week’s prompt was swimming pool. Swimming pool. Hm. I decided to go back to trying different brushes in Adobe Fresco and after some experimentation, made the choice to do the entire piece with only the ink roller brush. I varied the color, size, flow, and opacity to achieve different effects, but only used the one brush, which has quite a nice texture effect. The inner tubes were made by tracing the circle ruler (now over with the regular ruler tool, rather than the shape tool). The pool noodles were made by painting down, then holding at the end, which made the line snap straight (love this feature). I did employ the eraser on occasion, and some layers were deleted entirely and redrawn a few times. The end product (although really, nothing digital is ever done), has a rather retro feel, which is nice.

This week’s prompt from Inktober52 is “flow”. When I think of the word flow, first comes the images of water, then the idea of work flow. Interrupting all that cogitation was a timely new tutorial on the multi-color eyedropper tool in Adobe Fresco. So this post is about this nifty feature! When using the eyedropper tool to pick up a color, I can now select the multi-color option and basically make a tiny stamp from existing pixels. This color sampling can then be used with any pixel brush (there are more options, but this is what I explored today). My favorite thing is making 3D-like lines. The way the color is laid down depends on the direction of the stroke, so I wrote “Flow” from left to right, then drew the swirl from right to left to demonstrate. I kept my sample color swatch in the upper right so you can see how that translated into the stroke. And because it is 3D-like (I say that because the light and shadow aren’t quite right), I had to add a shadow. I haven’t found a shadow option in Fresco yet, so I set my brush to slightly larger than my line, in a soft round opacity, and traced the line in opacity reduced black on a separate layer. Then offset the “shadow” using the move tool. I’m very excited about this feature and the possibilities!