It would be a great way to pass the time on the train, even work up some ideas before committing the oils to the canvas, or try out a new medium (it can do watercolor styles as well). I’ve been tempted to go that route for the notetaking capabilities, and now, if I could do paintings? Well, that could be fun.

Now, for me, this is really quite uncharted territory, as there’s no iPad in the house here that is new enough to be able to work with the Apple Pencil (or the apparently quite nice Logitech alternative). With the new Adobe Fresco app, that could certainly be less of a hindrance. I enjoy it, but making time for the painting (and then the cleanup) can often stop me from heading to the workbench. I long enjoyed his shows as a relaxing time, and a little while ago was able to jump into actually doing it when my wife picked up some starter supplies for me.

You know, the style popularized by the man himself, Bob Ross. You can even create new brushes in Fresco using Adobe Capture.For those who may not know, I enjoy myself a bit of wet-on-wet technique oil painting. If you aren’t the biggest fan of the standard UI, you can scrap the whole thing and craft a customized UI of your own. To make painting easier, Adobe Freco has an almost similar UI to Adobe Photoshop with the layer bar on the right and the toolbar on the left (you can even import your customized Photoshop brushes into the app). All the brushes are controlled using a stylus-so your hands won’t get messy on a particularly inspired day. Watercolor strokes aren’t entirely straight lines but rather have ridges and spread thinner the longer you paint with a single stroke.

Thick patches of oil leave deeper smidges of color. There’s a lot more to Live Brushes than just mixing colors even the ways the paints and oils react have a realistic feel to them. Using the Adobe Sensei drawing AI, the tool mimics the real-world behavior of various paints, oils, and watercolors to a point where different colors can be mixed to form interesting and lifelike results Combining more colors with varying degrees of intensity can result in new colors you wouldn’t usually find on a standard computer color palette.

Adobe fresco app commercial 2019