Rebelle badly needs some dry/scumbling brushes

@Dargun - Thanks for your input! I don't know if you saw my attempt at replicating some Photoshop brushes on page 2. I did watch a bunch of Rebelle brush creator tutorial videos and pretty much did what you described and created a batch of brushes. Although they are better than the default ones or the downloadable ones, they still aren't as gritty and dynamic as the Photoshop ones. 

The main issue that I can discern, is that Rebelle's brush engine doesn't seem to have actual simulation of movable virtual bristles that can splay out or bend in directions according to stylus pressure and stroke direction (I could be wrong about this---but that's what it looks like to me). This makes them much more static. While using different tips in one brush might solve the problem, it's a much more cumbersome process and not a 100% solution. Having actual dynamically moving virtual bristles would certainly make it feel more natural and the brush design process easier. 

The more minor issue is the lack of interesting brush tips and textures to achieve the dry brush/scumbling look, which obviously can be created by the user. Even Photoshop don't have those by default and you'd have to go download or buy additional brush packs to get that look. 

But there are brushes from other art apps that don't use dynamic bristles and only rely on a static brush tip and then maybe texture/grain, and they achieve the look I'm after. I tried to duplicate those brushes in Rebelle using the stamped brush tip process, but they didn't come out as well as I had hoped. When compared to the original brushes, they all seemed more tame and less dynamic. 

@fanton - I've been a fan of Yizheng Ke and Wangjie Li for years, and my own work is in that same school of art--basically impressionism-influenced realism. I have their brushes and we all have similar influences like John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Richard Schmid, Craig Mullins, etc. 

I'm not sure what it is, but I experimented with all the brush settings and could not match the results I can get in other apps. There's always something lacking. Sometimes I can get maybe 80% of the way there, but that last 20% just eludes me. 

You guys are welcome to download the brush set I created and try them (posted higher up on this page), and then see if you can improve upon them.

Hi Rob, I made a quick edit of the first brush in your pack, for me this works a bit better as a scumbling brush, even if its not what you're looking for, i hope it might help to see what I changed in the brush creator panel.

also, after messing around with it some more, I agree, 'dryoff' should not be linked to opacity (aka, we should be able to make the less dense brush texture opaque).

That's cool. Your edit looks a bit more natural. 

The way the grain of the brush is handled is half of the equation. To get a more expressive looking dry/scumbling brush, the bristles would need to be dynamic and actually splay and bend and move according to the stroke direction and pressure. The brush engine in its current state doesn't seem to be able to do that. 

LunatiqueRob, that is very nice work you do and I am looking for the same thing. I also,prefer that dry/stumbled/texture revealing look and it is what I do with traditional materials. I'm just starting with digital painting and would like to see those brushes included by default with rebelle. It is truly a wonderful art program and needs it 

!

Ron

Schmid is one of my all time favorites also! Thanks for sharing your brushes..... I will also give the, a try 

Now that Rebelle 6 is out, it should contain new brushes that are close to what I have been trying to achieve. I'll post my thoughts after I've had time to really test them out. 

I just spent some time testing out the new brush engine and the new brushes. They are definitely a step in the right direction and are a lot more expressive than in version 5. There's still quite a ways to go before Rebelle can achieve the kind of brushwork I use in Photoshop and other art apps though. I'll explain what is still missing.

First, the new grunge type of brushes have a tendency to become homogenized and soft grained when using lighter stylus pressure, resulting in a smooth grained look similar to pencils.

Some brushes retain their unique texture better than others, but none behave the way that I'm hoping for.

If we look at a few Photoshop brushes, you see how even with lighter stylus pressure, the unique texture/grain of the brushes are retained--they don't fade and become too soft/smooth--the grains just start to become more sparse until they disappear completely. This is essential for maintaining the grit of the brush even at low stylus pressure.

Another issue I noticed, is that the oil/acrylic grunge brushes have this strange behavior where if I already painted a few strokes on the canvas, then try to paint more strokes with lighter pressure that overlaps the previous strokes, they would only show up in areas already with previous brush strokes, and will skip the other areas of the canvas. I would have to press harder for the strokes to show up on areas of the canvas that don't already have strokes painted, and this is a problem. 

Dynamic bristles is another missing feature, and they are important because they provide a much less predictable and interesting expressiveness, since the bristles can splay out or clump together according to the angle and movement of the stylus. 

You can see how I utilized dynamic bristles in the background of these portraits:

Another missing feature that makes it impossible for me to paint the kind of portraits I could in other art apps, is the brush size limit. I would prefer if there was no limit on brush size and we can resize the brushes however large we need, and let us decide if a brush is lagging too much or the texture/grain has distorted too much. The reason this is critical is because if you look at how I paint large patches of textures in the backgrounds of my portraits, they have to be done with very large brushes to prevent the look of busy numerous thinner strokes that would ruin the amorphous textured look. You can see how larger brush sized could achieve the look I wan in the backgrounds of these portraits:

One more thing I would need in order to do the same kind of portraits I do in other art apps, is gesso textured brushes. You can see how I utilized them in almost all of my paintings posted in this thread, as they provide a very interesting and expressive look that cannot be achieve otherwise. I can maybe get around it by applying a large sheet of gesso textures using layer blend mode, which is a technique I've used in other art apps too, but it's a more static approach, and sometimes I need to have the gesso texture during the painting process to control where they show up. 

The last thing I want to show, is how I generally approach painting my portraits. You can see in these examples below of the finished vs somewhere during the process, when I'm just laying down textures for the backgrounds. You can see how I need all the features I mentioned above in order to achieve the look I want:

LunatiqueRob,

Can I ask which brush packs you use for PS? You mentioned you purchased them and there are so many when I try to do a search. I use PS a lot also!

Regards,

Ron

I also have a ton of Photoshop brush packs (I've spent hundreds of dollars on them), but the one that will get you many of the kind of brushes I used in my portrait paintings is the Greg Rutkowski pack. https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/17eo/greg-rutkowski-brushes

Thank you so much for the link for the PS brushes!!