In a rare move, Adobe has made its Fresco drawing and painting software completely free as the app celebrates its fifth anniversary.

“Today, we’re embracing creativity for all by making Fresco completely free for all users, so anyone and everyone can discover—or rediscover—the joy of drawing and painting with the support of Adobe Fresco,” the company wrote in the announcement.

Adobe had a rather limited free edition of Fresco with no advanced features, but now everything the app offers is available at no charge whatsoever. Fresco supports cloud storage and doesn’t try to shove generative AI features down your throat, but the software isn’t as popular as competing apps like Procreate.

The good news doesn’t stop here—Adobe has also made over 1,000 brushes completely free to use, including pixel brushes, live oil and watercolor brushes, and vector ones. For even more variety, you can import your own brushes to doodle, sketch, and draw.

While you can now download and use Adobe Fresco at no charge, you’ll need to create an account to use the app to the fullest extent. Fresco supports Apple, Google, and Facebook social logins. Alternatively, you can sign up for Fresco using an email address and password.

Fresco made its iPad debut in November 2019 before expanding to iPhones and Windows PCs. It was offered under a freemium model, where you could use the app with a rather limited free starter plan, with advanced features requiring subscribing to one of the paid plans.

Fresco is now free and better than ever, as Adobe recently rolled out new features to celebrate the app’s anniversary. One of my favorites is one-tap motion presets for animating and moving objects, making it a cinch to create instant animations.

To activate motion on any layer of your illustration, select “Path” and pick one of the eye-catching templates under “Motion presets,” such as Bob, Breathe or Bounce. These presets can make your creations come alive without painstakingly creating animations manually. Another cool feature is rotation symmetry, which allows you to draw perfectly symmetrical shapes and patterns by automatically mirroring every stroke on the opposite side.

Those who use Fresco on their iPad will be pleased to learn that Fresco also supports the latest Apple Pencil Pro features, such as haptic feedback, as well as tilt, barrel-roll, and the squeeze gesture. Fresco also lets you use unlimited layers, trim intersecting strokes by swiping over unwanted segments, and so forth.

You can download Adobe Fresco on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, and the desktop version is available from Adobe’s website. There’s still no Android version.

Source: Adobe