Built for the latest stylus and touch devices, Adobe Fresco brings together the world’s largest collection of vector and raster brushes, plus revolutionary new live brushes, to deliver a completely natural painting and drawing experience. For artists, illustrators, animators, sketchers, and anyone who wants to discover — or rediscover — the joy of drawing and painting.

Work with watercolors and oils that blossom and blend at your touch. Use vector and raster brushes together on the same canvas. Access thousands of your favorites from Adobe Photoshop and celebrated master Kyle T. Webster. Adobe Fresco puts the world’s largest and most advanced selection of brushes right at your fingertips.

We’ve reimagined essential tools for illustrators that are faster and better for stylus and touch devices. Draw using a modernized selection and masking process that lets you isolate parts of a layer and turn selections into masks. Customize your UI to make it easier for left- or right-handed drawing. And switch to full-screen mode to clear your canvas of distractions.

Start your project on iPad and finish it on your desktop — all your work is automatically synced to the cloud and your PSDs are exactly the same, no matter which device you’re on. Plus, with Creative Cloud integration your brushes, fonts, and Adobe Stock and Library assets are just a few clicks away.

Adobe Fresco and Photoshop on the iPad are made for each other. Use them together to combine images, retouch artwork, add text, and create with layers. You can work on your projects in either app — anything you create is auto-saved in the cloud when you’re online.

Fresco’s interface is simple and intuitive, making it easy enough for beginners to get cracking on the canvas quickly, yet offers enough controls for pros to feel this is attempting to be a serious program for them too. There’s no doubt Fresco is geared towards Creative Cloud users, with Cloud documents seamlessly bridging computers through to Fresco, integrating its workflow with Photoshop and Illustrator by mixing both raster and vector brushes.

The Home screen is simple, if a little stark, but everything is easily laid out meaning you can get to work swiftly. Recent work, an online gallery of other Fresco community users, tutorials and options to create new or import/open other files are all clearly written out and not hidden behind odd icons as many programs do.

Once you have a new canvas open, the simplicity continues with all elements being quite self-explanatory and shouldn’t be daunting for new doodlers and feel second nature for photoshop users. The UI is customisable to your workflow, including full-screen mode, which clears the screen so it’s just you and your masterpiece. All brush panels can be grabbed and docked where you need them, again to aid in setting up your space just as you like it so as not to detract from your creative experience.

Oil painting and watercolours are a tactile, messy pastime and effuse memories of classroom mishaps and the pungent whiff of turps. They are hands on, visceral and at times an absolute swine to control. It is this malleable evocative danger that makes them so appealing to artists and why most digital art programs miss the mark widely by being too synthetic or not blending colours well with paint sitting flatly in layers.

First-time users and onlookers will no doubt watch on in awe as the paint mix and watercolour bleed into one another on their iPad screens for the first time. However, if you’re experienced with the best digital art software, it will feel much like a polished but basic option.