Rebelle badly needs some dry/scumbling brushes

@michaelws - The Escape Motions team has done an amazing job, considering that in my 25 years of being a professional digital artist, the only art software that even comes close to tempting me away from Photoshop, and had successfully done so for some artworks. Before Rebelle, it was nearly impossible for me to do any artwork completely in another art software without exporting to Photoshop at least once to do something that only Photoshop can do (or it's too frustrating to do it outside of Photoshop). The other art software either lacked critical image editing features that all digital artists need, or they lacked the range of brushes and advanced brush engine Photoshop has.

With version 6, Rebelle has become complete enough that I don't even need to export to Photoshop anymore--unless I really need certain brushes that Rebelle can't yet do (such as the dynamic bristles and dry brush/scumbling). Rebelle is SO CLOSE to becoming my one and only go-to art software and with every update they release, I'm holding my breath and hoping to see it get closer and closer to that perfect ideal, and then I can finally give Adobe the finger and stop using Photoshop (I mean does anyone actually like Adobe as a company?).

For those who are following this thread, I want to point you to another thread I have that's closely related to this one, with more brush experiments. https://www.escapemotions.com/community/forum/t/39017/can-we-get-some-gesso-textured-papers-in-rebelle/1

Sorry, forgot to create the link: https://www.escapemotions.com/community/forum/t/39017/can-we-get-some-gesso-textured-papers-in-rebelle/1

Rob,

I am EXACTLY at your place in regards to digital media tools and the dry scumbling/textures issue in Rebelle. I have enjoyed your takin g the time to patiently explain your thoughts and experiments in trying to solve the problem.

I have come to the conclusion that I will just use Rebelle for what it does best, and Photoshop for what it does bese, and send layes back and forth with the plugin.

I have invested SO many hours into Photoshop, and it is AMAZING at the things it can do. And while I do not like the way Adobe squeezes every ounce of profit out of us, I suppose that is what companies do in a free enterprise system.

I admire your work.

--- Glenn Galen
My Gallery of Work

@GGALEN - Thank you. I hope sometime in the near future the Escape Motions team will delight us with an updated brush engine that can finally let us work 100% in Rebelle and not have to bother with Photoshop anymore. That is the dream. 

Thanks Rob for your time and effort and experimentation on this subject, and for pushing Escape Motions to make their cool software even better!

This is the latest portrait I painted in Rebelle, and while working on it, I ran into the limitation of Rebelle's brush engine again. 

I had wanted the background to be these prominent and expressive abstract-looking brushstrokes, but I simply could not achieve the expressiveness I wanted, no matter how I tweaked the brushes, so I ended up going for more of a stucco wall kind of textured background using impasto brushes. 

This is exactly what I was talking about before, with the dynamic bristles and the wider range of expressive parameter being controlled by the brush, using pressure, tilt angle, direction, etc., so the stroke is less static looking. 

Here are some examples of the kind of look I was going for but couldn't achieve in Rebelle. Whatever I did looked like stiff and rigid looking imitations because of the brush engine's limitations:

Another issue I ran into was the canvas/brush size limitation. I wanted to be able to print big (poster size), but the brush size has limitations and I couldn't get wide enough brushstrokes. I guess the only solution currently is to use smaller canvas size and then use the Nanopixel feature to upsize it later. 

I just realized the last portrait I posted contained a problem, so here's the updated version:

This thread inspired me. I made some scumbling brushes. Great word. Can\'t figure out how to share them on escapemotions.com so here is a link to my google drive.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d6CPp7jB5lEKDDh-k5GZW2C26qNu5cYx/view?usp=drive_link

Unzip it, and copy these brushes into your favorites folder. C:\Users\**your user name**\AppData\Local\Escape Motions\Rebelle 7\Brushes\Favorite\Default Set

Most of these should work with Rebelle 6, because I didn\'t use the new texture tab very much. Use the \"26_brush-marks.png\" as your canvas bg.

And here is a piece I made using mostly the "Scumbling faves"

Here are some brush strokes examples of the brush pack I shared in the post above.