I have been playing around with this app a lot this weekend, and am starting to understand some of the settings. I was making myself a quick reference guide, but I figured other people might find it helpful, too!
I highly recommend you download this, erase the parts where I put the paint down, and do it yourself to see how they interact! I don’t mind, and it’s super handy to see the differences live.
I used the default detail brush, no changes, at size 100, and I tried my best to keep each circle blob as identical as possible, just to make sure that wasn’t having any affect on how it blends. Now, you try!
Flow: this basically means how much pigment is on your brush. High flow is lots of rich color pieces, while lower flow makes for a lighter, softer stroke, even when both are the same color. This should not be confused with transparency, though, because each particle can be acted on by water to bounce around and blend.
Water flow: this is how wet your brush is. A high flow, like 100, is sopping wet with water. A setting of 0 is a dry brush, with no water at all. The water affects how each of those particles bounce around – more water, the further they can move around and the longer they’ll bounce about.
Pure water: this is when you double tap on the circle on the screen and it becomes blue, when you’re working with a water brush. This means that you’re just applying the water flow to the area (think of it as adding some clean water to a painting) to move the paint particles around and make them blend. I also refer to this as the “my iPad hates me” brush, because the calculations it has to make are insane and I like to make it lag apparently.
Drying a layer: you’ll see in a few of the settings I showed what the blends look like when you first dry the under setting. If you click on the layer, and then the … next to it, at the very bottom of the list is the ability to dry a wet layer. I find this difficult to wrap my brain around still, so when I want things to be distinctly different from each other, I put it in a new layer, as layers don’t react with each other (save for transparency/see thru). In this painting, pretty much each petal is it’s own layer.
If you’re new, and want to experiment but not go bonkers, I recommend you have your brushes set to 50 flow and 50 water flow for something that feels really close to IRL watercolors. I set mine to 75/75 when I want it to feel like sopping wet, but that’s just me.
I hope this helps you get a handle on this really powerful app, and if you’ve been too afraid to try it, give it a whirl, play with it until you get really mad at it, ignore it for a few days, and try again. At least, that’s how I do it!
Expect to see more watercolor pictures in the near future, as I get more confident with Adobe Fresco!
Update later in the day: 4 hours, but much easier than the previous to make!