Rainbow Speaker Music | Design + Animation

Hello! My name is Nesma Mavrakis and I have been creating projects involving the arts of graphic design and animation for over a year now. Today I'm here to walk you through the process on how I organize and create my 2D art, and how to use Adobe Fresco's basic animation features.

I'll be using my most colorful piece of art to properly showcase the beauty of creating digital art in Adobe Fresco! It was inspired by this one song from Splatoon 3 called the "Rainbow Color Incantation". It's a supper upbeat song that remixed a few previous songs from all the games in the franchise. I wanted to capture the energetic feel of this song when I came up with my ideas for this art piece, and I became thrilled with the result!

Supplies

1. Adobe Fresco (completely free)
2. Reference images of anything you can't draw freehandedly or by memory

Step 1: Drawing and Painting Your Assets: Backgrounds and Base Colors

I stared with the background. This will fill in the extra white space on your art board, and prevent your art from having a dull feel to it. I blended purple and red together, as they related colors on the color wheel. In this specific design, I used two different layers of paint with the paintbrush tool. This specific paintbrush tool is my personal favorite because the paint flows like watercolor on the canvas.

Step 2: Drawing and Painting Your Assets: Speakers

For the speakers, I just traced its overall shape and main details from the reference image. You would want to do tracing on a separate layer than your reference image so you can hide or delete the image afterward. Adobe Fresco comes with other ruler shapes, besides the classic straight-edge, that's how I drew perfect circles for the cones of the speakers.

Then paint the inside of the speakers with grey, this will be the base color of the speaker. Base colors act as the foundation of your art before adding details like shading, highlighting, or texturing. Keep the outline of the drawing on a separate layer from the main color. Same goes for highlights and shading, this helps you keep control over your individual details much easier.

I would recommend breaking your asset or subject into parts if you want to animate them later. For example, I created a separate layer for each of the cones of my speakers to be able to operate on those individual parts.

Step 3: Drawing and Painting Your Assets: Rainbows

Next up is the rainbow. I started out with straight lines of each rainbow and then used the liquify tool within the transform tool to shape them into zig-zags. Then I used the smudge tool to blend the colors together and make the rainbow look like watercolor paint.

1. The liquify tool has a bunch of different varieties and settings you can mess around with to get the look you need for any design.
2. The smudge tool works like your finger to pencil led on paper. It also includes different brushes that function as patterns for different styles of smears.

Step 4: Effects

Even the smallest additional details can make your art stand out.

This fog effect brings the art to life and makes it look like the speakers are on one of those rock band stages! And because it's a vibrant light blue, it looks like it glows a little bit. This illusion adds to the effect.

Using the overlay blend mode, I painted on a few patches of white all over the canvas to create this effect of flashing lights. The overlay blend mode brings out both the lights and the darks of your layer, creating stronger contrast, and then makes them transparent and glossy.

Blend modes are used to control how colors on one layer interact with the colors on the layers beneath them. They allow you create lighting, shading, textures, and special effects without having to manually paint every little detail from scratch.

Step 5: Basic Animation: Main Action

Here is where I apply the main movement to the rainbows and the speakers. The basic animation process in Adobe Fresco is pretty straight forward and easy to get the hang of, most of what you can do are presets that you can apply to individual layers and adjust to your liking.

You can pick from nine different, pre-made, basic animations, or you can completely customize the layer's movements with the settings bellow those presets.

I made the rainbows duplicate themselves as they moved, they grow and shrink, sway, and flash at the end of its run. If the rainbows multiply when they move, the copies that follow them will fill in the gaps between the rainbows. This is done by sliding the bar under add multiples.

For the speakers, I used the separate layers of the cones of the speakers and gave them the "Breathe preset" and increased their speeds to match a beat. This makes them look like they are playing music themselves.

(Bellow is the animation of the main action alone.)

Step 6: Basic Animation: Secondary Action

The secondary action involves the fog and the flashy lights. This animation is subtle, but spices up the presentation.

I made the fog slowly sway back and forth with the sway preset. And for the flashy lights from earlier, I made them fade in and out. These can be set and adjusted in the Advanced Settings section below the presets.

(Bellow is the animation of the secondary action alone.)

Step 7: Final Product

Here is all the animation together!

I hope I provided some insight on how to make digital art and helped you understand Adobe Fresco better!