How can I achieve 2.5D bristle effect?

[melo3]

I'm used to being able to have the bristles or brush edge have like a 2.5D border, e.g. light one side and dark the other or different coloured bristles. My paintings start pretty dimensional because of impasto brushes but then as I detail stuff rapidly flattens out because the dimension is only coming from the texture which diminishes returns with detailing rather than the detail coming controlled from the brush itself.

Rebelle from what I can see sort of has a 2.5D effect like with impasto but there's no actual shift in the light/colour value at the edge and it's bound to the canvas texture itself.
So what I feel is missing here is both the colour/light change at the edges of bristles and also controlled variation between different bristles.

When painting traditionally it's a very common technique in grass, hair and fur painting to apply different paint values across the different bristles (this happens naturally anyway if you have a lot of mixed thick paint). Then thick paint bristles themselves catch different paint or even light at edges. There is multi-colour brush mode I've seen but I found no way to control it like traditionally you can see and know what edge of a brush will have what paint colours when you put it down on your palette at the border of two colours. All multi-colour seems to do is give a impressionistic effect that's hard to control and kind of just fakes how it's achieved traditionally.

Currently I find it difficult to get grass and fur to get dimension in Rebelle.
I think if this isn't possible it's a very important feature because I have noticed that a lot of paintings made in Rebelle would have much more dimension if bristles had natural edging and thickness.

Anyone have any idea how to achieve this effect if it's possible?

 

[Tom Gallovich]

I'm used to being able to have the bristles or brush edge have like a 2.5D border, e.g. light one side and dark the other or different coloured bristles. My paintings start pretty dimensional because of impasto brushes but then as I detail stuff rapidly flattens out because the dimension is only coming from the texture which diminishes returns with detailing rather than the detail coming controlled from the brush itself.

Rebelle from what I can see sort of has a 2.5D effect like with impasto but there's no actual shift in the light/colour value at the edge and it's bound to the canvas texture itself.
So what I feel is missing here is both the colour/light change at the edges of bristles and also controlled variation between different bristles.

When painting traditionally it's a very common technique in grass, hair and fur painting to apply different paint values across the different bristles (this happens naturally anyway if you have a lot of mixed thick paint). Then thick paint bristles themselves catch different paint or even light at edges. There is multi-colour brush mode I've seen but I found no way to control it like traditionally you can see and know what edge of a brush will have what paint colours when you put it down on your palette at the border of two colours. All multi-colour seems to do is give a impressionistic effect that's hard to control and kind of just fakes how it's achieved traditionally.

Currently I find it difficult to get grass and fur to get dimension in Rebelle.
I think if this isn't possible it's a very important feature because I have noticed that a lot of paintings made in Rebelle would have much more dimension if bristles had natural edging and thickness.

Anyone have any idea how to achieve this effect if it's possible?

Hi melo3 don't know if this is what you had in mind but try skipping through these two videos. Maybe they will give you some ideas. Thanks Tom G.

 

[melo3]

I've tried those. What I noticed is their painting is quite flat, like bristles on top of bristles. That makes sense in their case because it's a watercolour-ish style, the texture isn't the focus of their pieces and imperfections are not so easily visible due to the muted appearance. However, for a thick oils technique it is very unsuitable. It's hard to not flatten out the base when fur/grass has no dimension as it's like layering stencils but this gives the bristles no form at all. The most I can do right now is layer light and dark grass/fur but it leads to a harsh texture effect and slows my progress greatly, so I get very limited to a distinct "Rebelle" textural look which makes my stroke style get lost because of me kind of fighting the brush system. He dabbed the lighter colour on top, which makes sense in the sense of form but it makes no sense at an edge. My paintings tend to be high-fidelity at the edges, as I make use of contrasting grounds and sometimes even tenebrism in my art. I kind of purchased Rebelle thinking it had proper z-depth as it's essentially what ads portray but looks so far it only applies to the canvas texture stencil to which there is no fine control over. It would be nice if Rebelle 8 added bristle dimension or at least had some form of colour jitter across the brush mark.