Rebelle 5 REBEL, REBEL
Escape Motions’ swish paint simulation software grows up and chases the professional crowd. It’s a stroke of genius
Price £90 (Standard) £150 (Pro) Company Escape Motions Web escapemotions.com
Sitting comfortably between the feature-laden package offered by Corel Painter and the more immediate ease of use of Artrage, Escape Motion’s painting software shouldn’t be overlooked.
Rebelle 5 boasts one of the best paint and liquid simulations available. It offers physical colour mixing based on real-world, traditional pigments – Cadmium yellow, Alizarin crimson, Ultramarine and others are included. It means you can accurately blend and merge colours on the paper or canvas in a realistic manner. It opens the door for countless ways to express yourself using paint, brush strokes and the canvas texture below.
We particularly love the Palette Knife tool when used with wet oils to push and stroke the paint and colour about the canvas. The Dirty Brush is great, too, enabling you to retain paint pigments on the bristles and merge colours together for dramatic results. The option to clean the brush between colours is another example of how far Rebelle 5 goes to create a truly realistic simulation.
MIX AND MATCH
Watercolours are a highlight. The new simulation offers a realistic granulation effect as the paint dries into the paper, bringing every brush stroke to the surface. The Dropengine takes things a step further by creating a beautiful dripping effect of paint moving down the canvas – you can set the tilt angle of the canvas yourself to create longer or shorter drips of paint. And if that isn’t enough for you, the Blow Tool enables you to push the wet paint across the canvas, mixing and merging colours to create intricate and unusual accidental effects.
With so much colour splashing about, it’s good to see that Escape Motions has refined its colour mixing and sampling palette. Colour blending is as easy as choosing and mixing pigments on a separate palette before applying to the canvas, offering total control over your paint tones.
You can also choose how light affects the colour, including options for transparent, opaque or semitransparent mixing for watercolours. Handily, you can also test your colour profiles before exporting.
PRO-LEVEL TOOLS
While previous versions of Rebelle were aimed squarely at the amateur or semi-pro market, this edition aims to entice professional artists to its canvases. The addition of Express Oils instantly speeds up the painting
process and is a great inclusion for concept artists. The Express Oils tool is based on Rebelle’s core oils simulations but aimed at making quick sketches, to prepare fast underlying paint and quickly cover the canvas.
Added to this is another new feature that gives you the ability to record your whole painting process and export your video as MP4 format – perfect for professionals looking to share or monitor their work.
Rebelle 5 Pro also comes with a handy Photoshop plug-in, enabling the sharing of layers between the two pieces of software. It’s another sign that Escape Motions is looking beyond its established users to new professional areas.
Likewise, the Nanopixel tech is also only available in the Pro edition. This enables you to zoom into the canvas right down to the grain in real time, as well as export a canvas 16 times larger for easy upscaling.
We love Rebelle 5, but it does come with a couple of caveats. For instance, some of the new additions are only available in the Pro edition, though you do still get the core new features (Express Oils, colour mixing, watercolour simulation and time-lapse recording). If you can’t afford the extra £60, you miss the connectivity to Photoshop, pigment colour mixing and Nanopixel tech, which is a shame.
Also, Rebelle 5 did occasionally stutter and slow down in use (we’re using a Wacom Mobilestudio Pro). Mostly, however, it breezes along smoothly, and its paint, colour and canvas sim never fails to impress.
With so much colour splashing about, it’s good to see that Escape Motions has refined its colour mixing