Rainbow Speaker Music | Design + Animation

Hello! My name is Nesma Mavrakis and I am a beginner in the arts of graphic design and animation. 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 making 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 songs from all the previous games. I wanted to capture the energetic feel of this song when I came up with the idea of this art piece, and I was really excited about the result!

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

I stared with the background. This will fill in the extra white space to make your art pop! In this specific design, I used two different layers of paint with the paintbrush tool. This paintbrush tool is my personal favorite because the paint flows like watercolor on the canvas.

For the speakers, I just traced its overall shape and main details from the reference image. You would want to do this 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, highlights, or textures. Keep the outline of the drawing on a separate layer from the main color. Same goes for highlights and shading, this helps keep control over your individual details much easier.

Next up is the rainbow. I started out with straight lines of each rainbow and then used the liquify tool in within the transform tool to move 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 want.
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.

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.

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

Here is where I apply the main movement, 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 them.

I made the rainbow to multiple things, it grows and shrinks, sways, and flashes at the end its run. I also made it multiply when it moves, meaning the rainbow will have copies that follow it to fill in the gaps between the rainbows.

For the speakers, I made a separate layer for the cones of the speakers and gave them the "Breathe preset" and increased their speeds to match a beat.

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

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

The fog does a slow sway back and forth, and the flashy lights fade in and out. These can be set and adjusted in the Advanced Settings section.

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

Here is all the animation together!