Rebelle 3, watercolour and painting desktop software

I was given the commission to create a client Christmas card and I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to try something I've always been meaning to do properly - digital watercolour.

Looking around at various review sites, the decision as to which software I would use came down to either Art Rage 5 or Rebelle 3. Reading several reviews I was swayed towards Rebelle 3. I chose it because I liked the description of the way it handled watercolour and I liked the colour management system. But it is a bit more pricey than Art Rage (£45 inc VAT).



Rebelle 3 for UK customers is normally priced at around £68 inc VAT but thanks to Black Friday sale and a further 10% discount for being an email subscriber, in the end I paid  £53 incl VAT from here - https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/index.php

I had a lot of fun playing around with Rebelle3. It's so incredibly realistic yet offers all the convenience of Photoshop and other art program functionality. I like programs that are immediately intuitive to use straight away and Rebelle 3 is definitely easy to use. I have not needed to refer to any reference guide or forum help (so far!). Each tool and panel has a pop out name so it was simple to discover what each tool did. On my laptop (32GB machine with i5 processor) the program ran smoothly with no lag or delay at all despite using five or six layers at a time. The Christmas card project used a canvas size of 14x10inches at 300dpi (roughly 36 MB when open). Saving the work did take some time however - around 15-20 seconds of waiting time.

Grappling polar bears - Christmas Card project created on Rebelle 3. In this screengrab I have painted an aurora borealis night sky using watrercolours. The foreground and bears are untouched at this stage.

The ability to wet the paper, tilt the canvas and even use directional air to blow on the wet paint to create streaky patterns all helped me paint the aurora borealis in the background of this image. The stars I used the dip pen tool and an opaque white. One truly amazing and helpful tool is the reference panel. This pop out box you can deposit any reference photo (in my case I chose a generic photo of the arctic with northern lights) and use it to guide your work as you paint, but being colour blind, my main benefit was to use the reference panel and eye dropper tool for colour picking.

In this screengrab you can see two very helpful pop-out windows - the reference panel and the colour set panel. I was able to create a custom colour palette based on the reference image and then use the eye dropper tool to select the colours I wanted.

Another reason I chose Rebelle over, say, Art Rage, is down to the colour management. From what I've read the colour palettes and the way it manages colour is far superior. You can collect and save palettes and even name individual colours. You can also take a reference image and ask Rebelle to create a custom colour palette based on the reference. All very beneficial as I need lots of help with colours.

The reference panel is always 'on top' but disappears when you move the brush over it, then reappears when you move the brush away from it. As I say, it's highly useful for me for picking colours with the eye dropper tool. In other art programs, I copy and paste a reference image as a new layer, then click back and forth. It's a bit fiddly so I much prefer the Rebelle way of doing things here.

Closer up detail where you can see how the paper grain shows through. Rebelle 3 has the more advanced ability to really fine tune the way the paper grain interacts with the paint.

In the image above you can see how the aurora parts are streaky, this effect was achieve using the air blowing tool. I also applied a bit of smudge. All the tools are really simple and easy to use which made experimenting fun.

The final image, above, was tweaked in Photoshop. I wanted to add contrast to the night sky and play around with saturation a bit. I could have performed these in Rebelle but I just prefered to play with them in the more familiar setting of PS.

One of the more fiddly parts of this project was trying to stop colours bleeding into areas they shouldn't. I made copious use of the erase tool and the manual lasso tool to remove bits I did not want. When I created this design, I had not yet learned how to use the Fluid Masking tool in Rebelle 3. Using this would have saved me a fair bit of time.

Despite a very clean and simple desktop appearance Rebelle 3 is actually a very powerful program. There are ways to fine tune almost every aspect of brush, canvas and colour. For simpler folk like me who rely on more tools than normal folk with regular colour vision, I found the reference panel and custom colour set maker to be hugely beneficial. Ultimately, whatever the tools you like to use, the end result has to be worth the effort. For my first project using Rebelle 3, I think the grappling polar bears came out exactly the way I wanted them to so I'm very pleased with the software.

First draft sketch for client approval

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