This week’s prompt from Inktober52 was “octopus”. With those fascinating flexible tentacles, this was perfect for word art. It is unfortunate that the word has only seven letters, but easy to have the eighth appendage reaching forward to give more movement. (And I always count the legs in octopus art, doesn’t everyone?)
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!
Last week’s drawing prompt was “cat”. Oh my. A photo search on my phone alone yielded 1,009 photos. So very many possibilities, and work and home life were hoppin’ so I decided to see if I could combine prompts again. This week’s prompt: “planet”. Hmm. Cat planet. Alrighty then. That does narrow the possibility matrix, but in very strange ways. My first idea was a cat playing with a planet, maybe even gripping a hapless Earth in its celestial jaws. But wait, what if the cat WAS the planet, and the drawing captures the moment that an orbiting moon catches the sleeping interstellar feline’s attention?
Fresco’s shapes helped me achieve perfect circles and ovals. The cat is very loosely modeled on our gray tortoiseshell house cat.
P.S. I forgot to hit publish. Oops.
I have to admit to being a bit stumped on the prompt “star”, so I defaulted to vector graphics in logo style. I am still building my skills in Adobe Fresco, but these aren’t outside my wheelhouse this week.
I started with a representational graphic of a sun, but thought it was a little blasé, so duplicated it, erased half, and recolored the new half with the fill tool. That worked well, so I did it again, but this time in thirds. It is interesting, but makes my eyes dance a bit. So I tried something else.
For the second iteration, I imagined a company in need of a logo. On this, I like how the star is part of the word (especially crossing the t), but that the star and S combo could also stand alone. It is important when designing logos that elements can be removed and used separately (think of the “smile” on an Amazon box!) I also took a slightly different take on the “shadow” of the text by stretching it up as well as offsetting it. Just to experiment.
This week’s prompt was “shield” from Inktober52. This was drawn in Adobe Fresco with an Apple Pencil using vector brushes. I made use of opacity in the brushes, so I could put the eyes on any skin color. This is a similar technique to what I use when painting eyes on rocks with acrylics, and make the rock the “skin”. I drew one eye without the highlights, then mirrored it for the second eye before adding the white dots.
Caryn's Creations 