Adobe Fresco: Live Brushes That Behave Like Real Paint

Adobe Fresco is Adobe's dedicated painting and drawing application for iPad and Windows, built around a technology called Live Brushes that simulates the physical behaviour of watercolour and oil paint with a fidelity that no other digital painting application has matched. Released in 2019 and continuously updated through 2026, Fresco has become the application of choice for traditional artists making the transition to digital painting, particularly watercolourists who have found that other digital applications fail to capture the fluid, unpredictable quality that makes watercolour distinctive.

The application is free to download with a limited set of brushes, and the full brush library is included with any Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. For artists who already subscribe to Creative Cloud for Photoshop, Illustrator, or other Adobe applications, Fresco is available at no additional cost. For artists who do not subscribe to Creative Cloud, a standalone Fresco subscription provides access to the full feature set.

Live Watercolour Brushes: The Technology That Changes Everything

The defining feature of Adobe Fresco is its Live Watercolour brushes, which simulate the behaviour of real watercolour paint on paper with a level of physical accuracy that is genuinely remarkable. When you paint with a Live Watercolour brush in Fresco, the paint spreads, bleeds, and blooms in response to the amount of water on the virtual paper, the angle and pressure of the stylus, and the existing paint on the surface. Paint applied to a wet area spreads and diffuses. Paint applied to a dry area stays where it is placed. Two wet colours placed adjacent to each other bleed into each other at their edges.

This behaviour is not a visual effect applied after the fact. It is a real-time simulation of the physics of watercolour paint, running on the iPad's processor and responding to every stroke as it happens. The result is a painting experience that feels genuinely different from other digital painting applications and genuinely similar to painting with real watercolour on paper.

For watercolourists who have tried other digital painting applications and found them unsatisfying, Fresco's Live Watercolour brushes are often the first digital tool that feels like it is working with them rather than against them. The unpredictability and fluidity that make watercolour both challenging and beautiful are present in Fresco in a way that they are not in applications that simulate watercolour through static brush textures.

The wet and dry controls give painters control over the moisture level of the virtual paper and the water content of the brush, allowing them to work wet-into-wet for soft, diffused edges or wet-into-dry for crisp, controlled marks. The ability to add water to an area after painting, to lift paint while it is still wet, and to let paint dry before adding subsequent layers mirrors the actual process of watercolour painting in ways that make the learning curve for traditional watercolourists much shorter than with other digital applications.

Live Oil Brushes

The Live Oil brushes apply the same physical simulation approach to oil paint, creating a painting experience where paint mixes on the canvas, picks up underlying colour, and behaves with the viscosity and blending characteristics of real oil paint. Strokes blend into each other at their edges, and the paint can be pushed and moved across the canvas in ways that feel physically convincing.

For oil painters exploring digital painting, the Live Oil brushes provide a more intuitive entry point than the pixel-based brushes of applications like Photoshop or Procreate. The physical behaviour of the paint is familiar, even if the medium is new, and the absence of drying time means that blending and reworking can continue indefinitely without the constraints of real oil paint's drying schedule.

Pixel and Vector Brushes

Beyond the Live Brushes, Fresco includes a comprehensive library of pixel brushes that covers the full range of digital painting and illustration needs. These brushes include the complete Photoshop brush library, meaning that artists who have built up a collection of Photoshop brushes can use them directly in Fresco. The pixel brush engine supports full pressure and tilt sensitivity with the Apple Pencil, and the brush customisation options are extensive.

Vector brushes allow artists to create clean, scalable linework alongside painted elements, making Fresco suitable for illustration work that combines painted backgrounds or textures with precise vector linework. The ability to work with both pixel and vector elements in the same document, and to export to formats that preserve both, makes Fresco more versatile than dedicated painting applications that work exclusively in raster formats.

Integration with the Adobe Ecosystem

Fresco's integration with the broader Adobe ecosystem is one of its most practical advantages for artists who already use Adobe software. Documents created in Fresco can be opened directly in Photoshop for further editing, with layers, masks, and other document structure preserved. The Creative Cloud sync means that work created on an iPad in Fresco is immediately available on a desktop in Photoshop, and vice versa.

For illustrators and designers who use Fresco for initial painting and sketching and Photoshop or Illustrator for finishing and output, this seamless integration eliminates the friction of file conversion and transfer that working across multiple applications typically involves.

Apple Pencil Support

Fresco is designed specifically for use with the Apple Pencil, and the application takes full advantage of the Pencil's pressure sensitivity, tilt detection, and double-tap gesture support. The Live Brushes in particular benefit from the Apple Pencil's precision and sensitivity, as the physical simulation responds to subtle variations in pressure and angle that a less sensitive stylus would not capture.

The application also supports the Apple Pencil Pro features introduced in 2024, including squeeze gestures and barrel roll detection, which allow artists to access tools and change brush orientation without interrupting their painting flow.

The Free Version

The free version of Fresco provides access to a curated selection of pixel, vector, and Live brushes, along with the full feature set of the application. The free brush selection is sufficient for exploring the application and for many practical painting tasks, and it makes Fresco accessible to artists who want to try digital painting without a financial commitment.

The free version does not include access to the full brush library, which requires a Creative Cloud subscription or a standalone Fresco subscription. For artists who find that the free brush selection meets their needs, Fresco can be used indefinitely at no cost.

Who Should Use Fresco

Fresco is particularly well-suited to traditional artists making the transition to digital painting, especially watercolourists and oil painters who have found other digital applications too far removed from their traditional practice. The Live Brushes provide a familiar physical experience that makes the transition less disorienting, and the application's focus on painting rather than photo editing or design means that its interface and tools are organised around the needs of painters.

Illustrators who want to combine painted elements with precise linework will find Fresco's combination of Live Brushes, pixel brushes, and vector tools well-suited to their workflow. The integration with Photoshop and Illustrator makes it practical to use Fresco as part of a professional illustration workflow rather than as a standalone tool.

The Bottom Line

Adobe Fresco offers something genuinely new in digital painting: Live Brushes that simulate the physical behaviour of watercolour and oil paint with real-time accuracy. For traditional painters exploring digital media, particularly watercolourists, Fresco provides the most convincing digital approximation of traditional painting behaviour available. The free version makes it accessible to anyone with an iPad, and the integration with Adobe's Creative Cloud ecosystem makes it a practical professional tool for artists who already work within that ecosystem.