Rebelle Master Series: The Power of Stylized Chaos Inspired by Ashley Wood
Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:49:03 +0200
Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/w9mD5nVd474
His work is often characterized by raw energy, layered textures, and a disregard for polish in favor of emotion. The pieces blend street-art gestures with oil painting subtleties, allowing flat silhouettes to interact with gritty, bristly detail. This mixture brings an immediacy and presence to the canvas that resonates deeply with artists across genres. His subject matter, often dystopian, sci-fi, and pulpy, feels nostalgic, yet powerfully current.
In this study, let´s prioritize water-based media to allow for organic movement and drips. Rebelle harnesses that wet-on-wet unpredictability, enabling textures and edges that develop naturally as the paint settles. Tilting the canvas and layering translucent pigment helps to create complex tonal shifts without overworking the surface.
Directly inspired by Wood’s layered, spontaneous techniques, allow the medium to behave as it naturally would, instead of controlling every detail.
Daniel Ibanez renders the figure of this study with intentional distortion and stylization. Proportions are exaggerated, limbs extended, and props like a sword or sci-fi blaster are introduced with a narrative flair. These choices serve not only visual impact but also emotional tone.
Stylization can be used as a tool to heighten gesture and movement. Use Rebelle´s Warp tool to adjust poses fluidly, without needing to restart the drawing. Prioritize gestures over anatomical accuracy and allow the composition to speak in dynamic terms rather than realistic ones.
Try not to use any reference or pre-drawing. The piece should be approached as a live composition, where design decisions are resolved on the canvas itself. This process allows for greater freedom and discovery. This looser method supports the goals of this study: to stay playful, embrace the unexpected, and echo the spirit of Ashley´s paintings.
His work illustrates that control is not always the path to energy. By keeping elements raw, expressive, and under-rendered, a sense of immediacy and individuality can emerge. Rather than focusing on polished realism, attention is given to how brushwork, layering, and gesture could be used to create presence and voice.
In a digital sketchbook setting, where layers and changes can be made freely, a piece like this becomes an act of exploration. Painting becomes less about perfection and more about momentum.
Ultimately, Wood’s influence demonstrates that energy, stylization, and intent can carry more weight than meticulous detail. In this painting, and throughout this Master Series, the focus remains on what feels alive, not what feels finished.
Happy Painting,
Escape Motions Team
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Daniel Ibanez is a fine artist and illustrator who works out of beautiful Colorado. He grew up plein air painting mountain landscapes and western imagery. He has a love of painting the human figure, portraits, and landscapes. Daniel has worked on films, comics, video games, and tabletop games. While his range of subjects is diverse, all of his work is rooted in his traditional art background. He has been an oil painter since he was 13 years old. His work covers a wide spectrum of subjects, from sci-fi illustrations to alla prima landscapes. He has a digital portrait painting class with Domestika and a growing YouTube channel for tutorials and demonstrations. Find him on Instagram and say hello!
Rebelle Master Series: Embracing Texture and Energy Like Nikolai Fechin
Thu, 28 Aug 2025 13:36:53 +0200
Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/UA3-MJFGYuE
To echo Fechin’s iconic texture-heavy technique, the canvas settings in Rebelle need to be dialed in for maximum impact. For this study, the texture scale is set to 100%, with a Gesso Rough canvas selected for that extra grit. Impasto depth is cranked up to 10, and paper texture is increased to enhance the tactile, sculptural look. These settings simulate Fechin’s dry-brush oil style, achieved historically by leaching oil from his paint with blotter paper, leaving behind thick, dry pigment. Let´s try to mimic this effect in digital painting with Rebelle’s unique toolset.
A key component of Fechin´s approach is an emphasis on gesture and strong body movement. Once ready with the dynamic reference image, start with bold and dark strokes to establish the composition’s foundational rhythms. This stage is more about feeling than precision, focusing on motion and presence.
Rather than relying on color-picking from the reference, try to mix color manually to mimic traditional oil mixing, using Rebelle’s naturalistic blending. The goal: to energize the entire canvas at once. In the tutorial video, Daniel Ibanez blocks in background tones and skin values early on to create harmony across the piece.
Switching to Rebelle’s “Paint & Blend” mode (shortcut “3”) allows for a beautiful interaction between new paint and what was already on the canvas. This technique creates rich transitions, mimicking Fechin’s nuanced interplay between smooth modeling and abrupt, textural edges.
Fechin’s portraits often blend soft rendering with knife-sharp textures and chunky impasto. This can be recreated by using Multicolor and Dirtybrush settings in the Oils properties in Rebelle, giving the strokes complexity and realism. Much like traditional oil painting, Daniel deliberately leaves some areas raw while others are carefully refined, striking that delicate balance between chaos and control.
From early block-ins to subtle shaping, the process of modeling form—especially on the face—should be a slow layering of lights and darks, almost like faceting a gemstone. This holistic buildup mirrors Fechin’s own method of constructing volume with planes and value shifts rather than outlines and flat shading.
Nikolai Fechin’s art is a masterclass in texture, expression, and boldness. Rebelle, with its unparalleled ability to simulate real-world media, offers artists a chance to explore this kind of painting in a digital space without losing any of the tactile magic. Whether you're a traditionalist or a digital enthusiast, Fechin’s work reminds us that it’s the energy in every brushstroke that brings a painting to life.
Happy Painting,
Escape Motions Team
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Daniel Ibanez is a fine artist and illustrator who works out of beautiful Colorado. He grew up plein air painting mountain landscapes and western imagery. He has a love of painting the human figure, portraits, and landscapes. Daniel has worked on films, comics, video games, and tabletop games. While his range of subjects is diverse, all of his work is rooted in his traditional art background. He has been an oil painter since he was 13 years old. His work covers a wide spectrum of subjects, from sci-fi illustrations to alla prima landscapes. He has a digital portrait painting class with Domestika and a growing YouTube channel for tutorials and demonstrations. Find him on Instagram and say hello!
Rebelle Master Series: Mastering Light like Joaquín Sorolla
Thu, 21 Aug 2025 14:03:02 +0200
Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/nrrOjnWlXrc
If you want to learn how to paint light, you study Sorolla. Just picture it: a man in a three-piece suit, standing barefoot in the sand, surrounded by sunbathers, fishermen, children, and beasts of burden—all while painting the shimmering Spanish coastline. But more than just people or scenes, Sorolla painted the light: the way it dances off umbrellas, reflects off sails, filters through waves, and wraps around figures. His sensitivity to color, tone, and atmosphere is unparalleled.
Source: www.sorollapainting.com
Start with the Light Source
Whether in a studio or outdoors, understanding where the light is coming from is key. In the studio, it might be a lamp with bounce light from the surrounding walls. In nature, it’s more complex—sunlight, skylight, and water reflections all mix.
Color Mixing for Realism
Using tools like Rebelle, you can mix light source color and surface color to create realistic tones. Add walls or nearby surfaces, and you can simulate bounce lighting to give objects richness and depth.
Nature’s Complexity
Painting outside (plein air) adds layers. The sun provides direct light, while the sky acts as a massive fill light. Shadows aren’t just dark—they're filled with purples, ochres, blues, and reflected local colors. Sorolla's shadows are full of color, just look at the reference image.
Let´s look at the techniques we can take from Sorolla´s work and apply them to the portrait example.
Underpainting with Watercolor Brush
Start loose. Use a fluid medium to block in shapes and proportions. This mirrors how traditional oil painters use turpentine-thinned washes.
High-Saturation Color Blocking
Create a vibrant underpainting with exaggerated hues. Purples, greens, lavenders—these form the emotional base of the painting while maintaining accurate values.
HSL Color Tweaking
Use the Hue-Saturation-Lightness sliders to keep values consistent while exploring wild color shifts in shadows. This helps create visual richness without breaking realism.
The big lesson? Value first, color second. You can shift hues and push saturation as long as the values are correct. Sorolla’s genius lies in how he bent color rules to serve the feeling of light—lavenders in forests, pinks in shadow, turquoise in sails.
Painting, ultimately, is about more than technique. It’s about feeling, bravado in brushwork, and personal expression. Sorolla reminds us that light is divine, and if you get that right, everything else will follow.
So next time you feel your work is flat or lifeless, refer to Sorolla. Let his work reignite your understanding of light. Keep his studies handy - sometimes the loose beach sketches are more inspiring than the polished studio pieces. Let light be your guide, not form. Paint the glow, not just the thing.
Happy Painting,
Escape Motions Team
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Daniel Ibanez is a fine artist and illustrator who works out of beautiful Colorado. He grew up plein air painting mountain landscapes and western imagery. He has a love of painting the human figure, portraits, and landscapes. Daniel has worked on films, comics, video games, and tabletop games. While his range of subjects is diverse, all of his work is rooted in his traditional art background. He has been an oil painter since he was 13 years old. His work covers a wide spectrum of subjects, from sci-fi illustrations to alla prima landscapes. He has a digital portrait painting class with Domestika and a growing YouTube channel for tutorials and demonstrations. Find him on Instagram and say hello!
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