Well, looong time no see. I’ve been having a bit of a health related crisis, nothing serious in the sense of being (potentially) fatal, just very painful and persisting for a long time.
I have actually been drawing and painting some and might go pack and catch up on some of the better ones here, but for now I want to talk about “Rebelle 7 Pro”.
I’ve been aware of it for quite some time now but never had the hardware to run it on, but now that I’m returning to work and entering a new phase, my employer insisted very strongly suggested that I stop working on my private Linux machine and bow to the demands of corporate security and certifications of such.
As annoying and most of all time-consuming that change was, it also opened up new possibilities.
A very fancy Macbook enters..
Now I had a very fancy new Macbook Pro Max and immediately thought: “Ey, ich sollte auf dem Ding echt mal Rebelle probieren!”.
But it turned out It wasn’t just going to be “trying-out-Rebelle-on-that-thing on a boring sunday” situation. For egonomical reasons, actually working on a laptop was out right out of the gate. I’m far too old (and achy) to do things like that on the regular.
With the Wacom Cintiq on the arm, my desk has become somewhat of an immovable object and I have no other and currently no place for one anyway, so…
The solution I came up with works quite well in practice, even if it looks jerry-rigged in parts: I just disconnected the Wacom from the Linux machine and connected it to the USB-C based laptop station that came with it. So switching it back is just replugging an HDMI and big USB in theory, but I never once switched it back since.
I control both machines with “Synergy 3” which allows network mouse sharing almost as seamlessly as using two monitors on one machine. I arrange it so that my former main monitor is rotated a bit to the left and I rotate the Wacom a bit to the right and then I can just move the keyboard and rotate my chair accordingly.
Painting in Rebelle
I have always liked the way Rebelle looks, both in finished paintings as well as watching videos of the process. I have always *hated* watercolor brushes in every painting program. They provide shitty implementations of watercolor process artifacts without providing anything like the way painting works in watercolor. They just feel like a mockery of something very beautiful.
But with Rebelle it was clear to me from the first look at it that it was different. Not only do the results look like watercolor, the process seemed kinda similar, too.
Another thing I was eager to try out was the oil paints in Rebelle. Due to my atopy I have a very hard time with a huge number of chemicals and it is very questionable whether even the mildest real oil paint and thinners etc pp would be even remote tolerable for me.
Rebelle Watercolor: A steep* learning curve
I will spare you my first attempts at Rebelle Watercolors since there was quite a bit of learning and getting used to it ahead of me.
But I persisted and quickly discovered what I was doing wrong. I expected the watercolor brushes to work, well, like real life watercolor does. But they don’t and I think rightfully so. It is really rare that I actually want to use the trademark watercolor artifacts like cauliflowering/run-backs in my real media art. Mostly I spent a lot of time learning how to avoid them.
Where Rebelle differs from real life watercolors is exactly those areas. Rebelle Water™ does not work exactly like H2O.
My working theory on Rebelle Water™
So Rebelle has two kinds of water in a way. There is the water tool which applies kinda puddles of flowy water which rewet colors and which might also form running droplets if you configured Rebelle that way (Enable in “Visual Settings” and then activate “tilt” to actually make it run).
You can apply on a “dry” canvas as well as on a “wet” one.
(* a steep learning curve is a good thing. If you plot current skills over time, a steep curve means that you learned a lot in a short time. It’s not a physical mountain.)
Wetting
And then there is wetting via the menu above the layers view. Both create wet surfaces, but can work on selections and stencils, but the menu creates kind of a minimal covered surface where every nano-pixel is either wet or dry but contains a minimal amount of water.
Rebelle Water™ Behavior
But in the end it does not really matter how much water there is on the canvas, as long as it does not flow. The result of applying a new watercolor brush stroke is not some complicated interaction with canvas water levels and water amount in paint and capilary forces and whatnot.
In real life watercolor, I have to carefully consider paint consistencies and rank them in levels, commonly named after traditional non-vegan food (cream,milk,tea,water). You generally work light to dark but you don’t need to do strict phases. If I have a color on an not-quite-dry real life canvas, I can “drop in” a thicker color and it will blur out a bit depending on the drying time I used. This is very useful for color variations within a wash.
But in Rebelle, the outcome of the new brush stroke is determined by the amount of water in the new color. If I try to drop in a color with the water slider all the way left it will just sit there if the canvas is just wet. Only when I added lots of water with the water tool and the water I added first is running, then the dry color on top will run with it.
The water level of the new brush stroke controls how much it flows basically. I can set the water to the level of blur I want, I stop time/”pause diffusion”, paint the brush strokes I want in all the colors I want and then when I unpause time it will all start to flow into each other and there will only be run-back if I carefully engineer it with the blow tool.
You can watch the diffusion happen in real time and if you don’t like it at any point, pause time again and undo. The last state before you unpaused time before will be restored and you can make changes to the settings, granulation, and tilt to run it again differently.
Painting Session Recordings
Painting Session Recordings are really cool. I always wanted to try it out but something held me back or something or I painted something and then thought “Dangit, I could have recorded that.”.
But one time I accidentally had recording on and the result from the painting above is super cool and also fun to watch.
Since I had no idea I was recording, I had to stitch this together from multiple vids, but the result is really nice.
