Rebelle Pro 7 is quite simply the best digital painting toolset I’ve ever used. Having first picked up the software way back with the original Rebelle 1 release (back when it was more of a tech demo or digital desk toy) in 2015, I have been frankly amazed at how the tool has developed. It wasn’t until 2020 that I finally found it to be useable as a tool for me to use for the full process of a painting (Rebelle 4), the Turkey Vulture being the first fully finished work if I remember correctly.

Since then, unless I am working on my iPad, it has pretty much become the only tool I use while working on a painting. I’ll still use other tools for the final edits if needed, but I love that I can now keep the entire creative process in one tool. To quote Escape Motions themselves:

“Rebelle is the award-winning, hyper-realistic painting software with phenomenal oils, acrylics, watercolors, and other wet and dry media. Paint pigments color mixing, oil thickness, watercolor diffusion, and NanoPixel technology, convincingly mimic the way natural media interact with the canvas and itself.”

They are not over-egging the pudding here, Rebelle is leagues ahead of the competition when it comes to providing the synthetic art tools artists like myself have been longing for for years. Sometimes, watching as the paint mixes on the canvas, and dries in over time, it feels like I’m watching a magic trick. It doesn’t just do a good job of simulating the end result for the art enjoyer, it simulates the process itself in an enjoyable and intuitive way for the artist. Being able to attain a flow state is so important to many artists that having tools like this becomes invaluable.

I’ll still use other tools when I have to, but the more Escape Motions develop this toolset over time the less likely it is going to be that I need to switch at all. I am glad though that their development always remains focused upon the core tools, and not adding the (often vestigial) bells and whistles that other tool suites do in an effort to be Photoshop instead of being their own thing. I’ll discuss a couple of the tools in Rebelle in the techniques section below, but there are some I’d like to cover here first.

Pigment Based Colour Mixing

This is a relatively new feature to Rebelle (and if I’m not mistaken they have been the first of all the painting apps to implement it), and it has been as disruptive to my workflow as it has been exciting and stimulating. Basically, it functions completely differently than colour mixing has operated on computer programs since the very first computer projections onto a screen. According to X-Rite, colour is created with additive mixing like this:

“RGB devices start with darkness and add red, green, and blue light beams over a black surface or screen to create color. Each of these beams has a level of intensity, from fully on to fully off. These red, green, and blue beams superimpose in various intensities to create a spectrum of color.

The color we perceive is determined by the intensity of each beam. For example, if each beam has zero intensity, meaning no light, the screen or surface will appear black. If each beam has full intensity, the screen or surface will appear white. If all three beams have the same intensity, the color will appear gray.

We see color based on the intensity of each beam. If the red beam is strongest, we will see red. If the red and blue beams are equal intensity and the green beam is low, we will see magenta. This secondary color is achieved by mixing the two primary colors, red and blue.”

Pigment Mixing, on the other hand is a Subtractive Colour System, explained by Escape Motions as follows:

“In the subtractive color model, pigment is used to produce color using reflected light. This color model is used in printing, silk-screening, traditional painting, and other mediums that add pigment to a substrate. The subtractive colors are cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, also known as CMYK.

With the real paint pigments (e.g. Cadmium Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine, etc.) it gets even more complicated because nature and its chemistry get involved. To put it simply, the real paints get their colors from the mass of pigment particles, which absorb and scatter the light in a complex fashion.”