Monday, November 11, 2024
MacReviews

Escape Motion’s Rebelle is a fun watercolor, acrylic painting app for the Mac

By Aaron Lee

Escape Motions’s Rebelle is a fun watercolor and acrylic painting application for macOS. Its watercolor simulation is based on a real-world color mixing, blending, wet- diffusion, and drying.

About Rebelle

Rebelle mimics the way natural media interacts with the canvas and itself. Users can paint, smear, re-wet dried colors, blow wet washes across the paper, tilt the paper to create water drops and runs and create countless fantastic watercolor effects. Wet tools — watercolors, acrylics or ink pen — can be combined with pastels, pencils, airbrush many other dry-media tools and effects.

Features include:

  • “Ultra-realistic papers”: you can use not only textured paper backgrounds, but also an imitation of real watercolor papers, some of them with deckled — rough and irregular edges, including: hot press, cold press, rough, Japanese, canvases and others.
  • Watercolor simulation code re-design: To adapt to the new papers, a watercolor simulation code has been rewritten to be even more realistic than ever before.
  • A new DropEngine: aAn implemented engine enables more realistic paint drying and dripping. You can blow drops and create watercolor dripping effects.
  • A Masking Fluid layer. The masking fluid allows you to paint freely over the masked area. 
  • Straight line, Ruler and Perspective tools.

And the latest version (Rebelle 4)  adds hyper‑realistic digital oils and acrylics. It also boasts 4x faster painting and minimal lag between the stylus and cursor. Additionally, the brush size is 4x larger covering 16x larger area compared to Rebelle 3.

Rebelle is available for US$99.99 at the  Escape Motions website. 

Review overview

Features9
Price8.5
Ease of use7.8

The Pros

  • Watercolor simulation is impressive
  • very fast
  • great brush size choices

The Cons

  • Has a bit of a learning curve for non-artists

summary

8.4If you love to draw and paint on your Mac, Rebelle 4 is a great app for you.

Dennis Sellers
the authorDennis Sellers
Dennis Sellers is the editor/publisher of Apple World Today. He’s been an “Apple journalist” since 1995 (starting with the first big Apple news site, MacCentral). He loves to read, run, play sports, and watch movies.