15 - New Painting Journey This Summer

General / 09 July 2021

After creating many oil painting artworks in Adobe Fresco for the past five months, I'm trying new painting experience with Rebelle 4.

As an active subscriber at New Masters Academy, I got a wonderful 40% discount bonus for purchasing Rebelle 4. That's how I started to learn how to use this cool new painting software. I painted this female portrait based on an online course taught by Amy Florence to figure out how oils work in Rebelle.

So far, I'm doing digital oil painting assignments from Digital Portraits After the Masters, an 8-week live class taught by Iliya Mirochnik. This class is motivating me to try mixer brushes in Photoshop, oils in Rebelle and even digital watercolor to do portrait painting. How cool is that! I did a master copy of "Smoking Man" (1961) by Oleg Lomankin with digital oils in Rebelle 4 as part of the painting assignments from Iliya's live class.

Oils are brand new in Rebelle version 4, and they feel even better than Live Oils in Adobe Fresco. Since I don't seem to get along well with soft round, hard round, and lasso painting in Photoshop, I've been looking for better and closer simulations of real watercolors and oils for a long time. Therefore, I was super thankful to Adobe Fresco for helping me get used to how digital oils work for the past five months. That's why I can now understand how oils work in Rebelle 4 faster.

There are five painting modes to switch back and forth when I do oil paintings in Rebelle 4:

  1. Paint - Press or hold "1"
  2. Paint & Mix - Press or hold "2"
  3. Paint & Blend - Press or hold "3"
  4. Blend - Press or hold "4"
  5. Erase - Press or hold "5"

This is fun, like pressing QWER keys to use different hero's abilities in MOBA games!

These modes really help make my oil painting look better since they provide more ways to manipulate paints than ever. If I press & hold "4" I will be using "blend mode" temporarily. After lifting my finger off the "4" key, it will go back the previously selected mode, like the "Paint & Mix mode", for example. What an addictive and helpful feature here, guys!

There is new way to mix paint as well. Besides the good old friend "Alt" key for Color Picking in most software, Rebelle 4 gives us a new button "x" to Mix paints. This makes mixing digital colors more convenient as I don't really have to paint two colors on top of each other, and then, pick the overlapped color like I would normally do. This is strangely exciting! The whole color palette below was created by "Alt" click the first color (Blue, for instance) then "x" click the second color (Red, Yellow, or White) to mix paints. Super neat, you guys should try this out someday in Rebelle 4!

I guess that's all for this month. Thanks for reading, my dear readers! If you want to see me on social media, I'm mostly active on Instagram (khang_ta_art), but you can find me on Twitter and ArtStation too.

I'll keep learning new painting skills and playing more with this software. See you guys around the start of the next month!

Have a wonderful day, everyone!