Alice Lee is a master of many mediums. From plain old paper, to tablet, to desktop, to the walls where she paints large-scale panoramas, the Bay Area-based illustrator and muralist knows her way around a lot of different creative tools. Each has its own benefits—and limitations—and she’s come up with clever ways to make the most of them in her mix-and-match, analog-and-digital workflow.

“My work is very shape-based. They’re my natural starting points—my building blocks,” Lee says. Ideation often happens in Adobe Fresco, where she’s comfortable pushing beyond her comfort zone and getting a little bit loose. “I’ll take my iPad and sit on the couch, in bed, or in my backyard, and it really gives me this feeling of openness when I'm drawing,” she says. “I use it like I would a sketchbook with colored pencils.”

“I’ll take my iPad and sit on the couch, in bed, or in my backyard, and it really gives me this feeling of openness when I'm drawing. I use it like I would a sketchbook with colored pencils.”

Sometimes, however, she opts to go offline, forgoing a mobile device for… well, an actual sketchbook and colored pencils. In the video above, she explains how she uses Adobe Capture to transfer those “rough blobs” back to Adobe Fresco; there, she can manipulate, polish, edit, and transform them into a complex, layered piece of art that she may eventually bring into Adobe Photoshop—or prep for projection as one of the many brightly colored murals she’s painted in San Francisco.

The how-to is intentionally open-ended, offering insights into the apps’ potential, rather than a prescriptive DIY. “I want to encourage people to experiment—to get out there and draw,” she says. “One thing that’s great about this process is that you can take your sketchbook wherever you feel inspired. I actually think it’s more fun to draw that way, and these tools enable that.”

Follow along with Alice’s creative adventures on Instagram, and check out her process here.