Rebelle badly needs some dry/scumbling brushes

I should preface my post by mentioning that I've been painting digitally since the late 90's, and have used every digital art software that's worth testing out. Currently, Rebelle is one of my favorites, beating out other art software with similar focus (Corel Painter, Artrage, Painstorm Studio). 

With that said, it currently has a glaring hole in its brushes--dry/scumbling brushes. It's one that I absolutely need to have and use all the time in my work. I tried to simulate it with different brush settings in Rebelle (using both oil/acrylic and charcoal/pastel brushes) and I just couldn't achieve that look. I can do it fairly easily in some of the other art software (especially in Photoshop), and I would hate to be forced to have to get that look outside of Rebelle. I don't think anyone likes having to export between apps during their workflow. If we can get some nice scumbling dry brushes, it would really make the painting experience feel much more complete. 

Here are a few images to demonstrate the look I'm talking about. You can see how in my work, that dry/scumbling look is very important for imparting interesting textures. 

When I tried to get that dry scumbling look in Rebelle, the brushes were all too neat and smooth, unable to create less predictable dynamic behavior to achieve that dirty, gritty look I want when imparting a sense of texture in my brushwork. The additional "texture" brushes I downloaded from Escape Motion's website were like that too, even if they did create more chaotic looking texture patterns. The problem is, if I decrease the load or oiliness, it simply makes the paint more diluted/faint, not more dry. It's also impossible to get that scumbling effect where the bristles are splayed out in chaotic directions as you scrub the canvas with the dry brush. 

Anyway, I just wanted to bring this up, because I would love to see these types of dry scumbling brushes in Rebelle. It'll make this amazing software even better, and I wouldn't have to switch to other apps just to achieve that look. 

I guess i understand what yo are looking for. You can achieve something like this:

Locate any "Rake" Brush. For example the Rake ones in Oil category. Or better you can download my watercolors brushes (in the Free Assets section); it have some Rake brushes not so smooth as the default ones.

Copy the presset with contextual menu.

Paste presset in Pastels.

Use the new presset in Mixer only mode. This will drag existing pixels.

Probably the new presset will still look too smooth. Tweak it. Try switching off Smudge, add a little of angle and space jitter. Change the grain. Deactivate Grain Smoothing. And maybe the most important, activate Tiled Grain.

You can also use any Texture brush (there's many in Free Assets section) in Mix only mode.

Thanks for the tips! I tried them out, but couldn't get anywhere close to the kind of looks I'm after. This is what it ended up looking like:

But take a look at what I'm able to achieve in Photoshop without needing to do any customization--just presets from brush packs I have purchased:

You can see how in Rebelle, no matter what you do, the results always end up too clean and neat, lacking the gritty, dirty, chaotic textures that I love so much. Also, these brushes in Photoshop aren't just a bunch of random jitters that you can't control. I can totally paint in a very controlled manner with them, as demonstrated in my work posted above. 

It seems in Rebelle, those texture brushes I downloaded can get somewhat close, but they are too random in their jitters and very hard to control if you want to apply them to specific areas, and they still contain to much paint and not dry enough to create the kind of gritty look I'm after, even if I try to decrease the load. The main problem is that with Rebelle's brush engine, when you decrease the load or stylus pressure, it's acting more like a brush opacity control, instead of controlling the amount/wetness of the paint. Ideally the paint will start to run out and dry up, creating that gritty dry scumbling look.

I've seen numerous other posts here asking for that feature (ability to let the paint run out and become more dry), so I know I'm not the only one who wants this in Rebelle. Some of the posts even placed so much importance on it that they said they will not buy Rebelle until that feature has been added, and in some ways, I agree with them. 

Here are a few more tests done in other art apps:

Artstudio Pro:

Procreate:

Infinite Painter:

Obviously this is doable, and doesn't necessarily require a fast desktop computer's resources, since these were all done on the iPad Pro. But to be fair, there are other apps I tried that couldn't quite get this look--at least not from the preset brushes--such as Corel Painter, Artrage, Paintstorm Studio, and Krita. It's probably possible, but I didn't have time to customize, whereas the above screenshots required no tweaking of the brushes at all--they're just preset brushes. 

Any solutions for the lack of dry brush/scumbling brushes? Maybe I have overlooked something? If I can get these types of brushes in Rebelle, it would be amazing, because then I could just stay in it and not have to export out to other apps just to get that look I use so much in my artworks. 

Hi LunatiqueRob,

According to our development team, this should be doable with the current settings of the Brush Creator panel.

Could you please send us the actual names of the brushes in the particular software that you provided as an example?
We will look closely into their settings and will try to help you create such brush in Rebelle.

Thank you in advance!

I spent a few hours putting this together. I went through my huge Photoshop brush collection and selected some that I feel are representative of the kind of brushes I'd love to see in Rebelle. They allow me to paint with dynamic bristle movements/angles, and/or interesting and dynamic gritty textures, but are still easy to control (as opposed to just scatter/jitter all over the place unpredictably). The ones with gesso textures built in are also some of my favorites, and I wish Escape Motions had a paper collection that contains various gessoed textured surfaces (from fine and neat brisle marks, to wild and rough bristle marks, of various stroke sizes, angles, curves, etc). What these brushes all have in common, is the dry brush/scumbling quality, where the paint is drying out and being rubbed onto the surface in a way that creates a gritty and grimy textured look. The problem with Rebelle's brush engine right now, seems to be that when decreasing the load, the paint doesn't actually dry out and create this effect--instead, it tends to just decrease the opacity of the brush. 

Here are the brushes I used to create the preview images below: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuJvJJ14eSzGhY5l2gYT18CG0TkVQg?e=7zo0Yq

Sorry, the link to the brushes didn't show up as clickable, so here it is again (it's stored on my OneDrive cloud storage, and perfectly safe to download--it's just a Photoshop .abr file): https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuJvJJ14eSzGhY5l2gYT18CG0TkVQg?e=7zo0Yq

I just spent many hours experimenting in Rebelle, trying to achieve the kind of dry brush/scumbling effect I'm after, and no matter what I try, the results are just not as gritty and dynamic as I want. Here are a few of the brushes I customized in Rebelle, but they don't look/feel anything like the Photoshop ones I posted above: 

I'd also like to show some great examples of real dry brush/scumbling from the master painter, Richard Schmid, who used that technique so well to make his paintings more expressive. The developers of Rebelle probably are already aware of his work, but if not, analyzing his brushwork will really help with the brush engine development.