Free drawing & painting app Adobe Fresco adds motion tools & more for Adobe MAX 2021

Art by Syd Weiler.

For this year’s MAX, we think Adobe Fresco’s features will truly get you moving in more ways than one. Adobe Fresco is a completely free drawing and painting app just for those who love to create art. Hundreds of brushes, unlimited layers, and powerful tools are accessible to anyone across iPhone, iPad, and Windows without a subscription. If you currently subscribe to All Apps or Photoshop, you’ll find exclusive access to 1000s of brushes including Kyle Webster’s incredible sets. But you don’t have to be a subscriber to make beautiful illustrations with all the powerful tools like masking, selections, clipping masks, and new as of this Adobe MAX — motion!

Motion in Adobe Fresco can add a new dimension to any piece of art, even artwork you’ve already created. You can apply a timeline to individual layers and add frames of motion to each layer, which allows you to keep parts separated. Or, you can draw a path and have parts of your illustration follow that path like floating clouds or falling rain. These features are designed to be simple to use so anyone can create beautiful animations easily.

Perspective Guides simplify realistic drawing.

‘Perspective’ is an important concept to create realistic depth to your artwork so that it looks like the world around us. Adobe Fresco takes the guesswork out of this process by adding Perspective Grids. This feature gives you more freedom to create — allowing you to set your vanishing points anywhere you like, even off the canvas. Your lines will snap in perfect perspective, leading the eye and creating natural looking depth. Focus more on the art than the work — and finish with a realistic looking outcome.

Vector Jitter Brushes add a dash of energy.

Vector brushes are sharp, crisp and infinitely scalable so you never have to worry about document size. This new update adds three new vector brushes with ‘jitter’. The ‘jitter’ creates unique edges to give your strokes more texture and personality. Try them out for a more natural look, while still retaining the sharpness that vector artists love. And of course, you can combine your vector strokes with all those pixel brushes too — right in the same Adobe Fresco canvas.

Reference Layers speed up your coloring process.

‘Reference’ layers are a special mode to make coloring line-art speedy-quick. Try it out when you are ready to color, and you want to get it done fast. Set the line-art as the reference layer, and create a new layer for your fills. As you use the fill tool, it will reference the lines on your line-art layer, but create the color on the empty layer. It’s magic, and it works with pixel or vector layers. Reference layers are not yet available in the app store version of Fresco, but you can find them in the prerelease version. Please submit your request to join prerelease via this form.

The Adobe Fresco team has an agenda — to make Fresco the best drawing and painting app around. You can help the team by giving your feedback on features and tools you want to see. And again — Adobe Fresco is free for everyone, even if you aren’t a subscriber to Creative Cloud. So get drawing today — we think you’ll agree with us that it’s pretty darn great.

Want to see what people are drawing in Fresco? Take a look at the Fresco Gallery and Fresco Streaming Gallery on Behance

Want to follow along on social? Catch Adobe Drawing on Instagram or Twitter

Have a feature suggestion? Post it on UserVoice

Want to learn something new? Do that at Adobe Fresco Learn and Support