Making a (Digital) Hake Brush - Part 2

Each parameter chosen in Rebelle Brush Creator helps this digital hake brush behave like a traditional watercolor tool. Here's how the parameters work, and how you might modify them for special uses.

Understanding the digital version

The digital hake brush has these parameters in Rebelle Brush Creator:

So, why these parameters?

1. The traditional hake brush is a flat brush that makes a rough mark. So, I chose "Flat Noisy 3" for the Shape and "_01-3" for the Grain. In Rebelle, the Shape and Grain act like two masks, one above the other, that combine to direct the color into a basic stamp "shape." Note, you might make this basic shape either smoother or rougher by substituting a different Grain—e.g., using  "_01-3 blurred" or "_01-3 blurred lighter" for a smoother mark, or using "Sponge 2" for a rougher mark.
2. The goat hair bristles on a traditional brush are short and very soft. Under pressure they bend and splay crazily a little bit, but with a lighter touch they barely caress the paper. To capture this behavior, I set the Pressure Size to 40 and Pressure Opacity to 100. (If these settings were 0, then increasing pressure on the digital pen would have no effect on the size or opacity of the mark.) These positive settings mean the mark gets a bit larger (but not too much larger, since the bristles are short) and much more opaque. The flip side of the latter feature means when you lightly touch the digital pen to the tablet or screen, the mark is very light. Note, you could pull the Pressure Opacity down a bit, but this would make it more difficult to create an opaque mark with the brush.
3. As I said, the traditional brush makes a rough, unruly mark. To emulate this effect, I set the Spacing and Scatter of the Shape rather high at 12 and 5 respectively. The Spacing determines how far apart that basic stamp shape is placed in the line of your stroke, and the Scatter determines how its placement varies from side to side of the line of your stroke. This brush is a bit all over the place. Turning on Smudge would smooth things out (and, perhaps, cause the brush mark to lag behind your pen stroke), so I turn it "off." 
4. Watercolor artists usually paint with the wide side of the traditional brush. Currently the brush is set up to paint on the flat side: I set Shape Rotation to "Pen Rotation," which will 'rotate' the basic shape to keep its wide edge perpendicular to the direction of your pen stroke. Note, for an interesting variation, you can paint with the brush edge by tweaking two parameters: change Pen Rotation to "None" and increase the Angle to about 82. Switching these parameters around takes too much time when you are painting, so I suggest you create a second hake brush for edge painting.
5. Traditional hake brushes vary in width between 1/2 inch and 6 inches. The smaller ones are used in small travel kits, and the wider ones are used on larger studio canvases. Unfortunately, the widest mark this digital brush can make is only about 1.75 inches wide on a 150 dpi canvas, 1.25 inches wide on a 200 dpi canvas, or .75 inch wide on a 300 dpi canvas. (The maximum width of the mark is a function of the Rebelle Watercolor category and cannot be increased by adjusting the individual brush's parameters.)
6. A medium setting of 40 for Canvas Texture allows the brush to respond to just the 'raised areas' of the canvas texture with a light pressure, but also push color down into the crevices with a heavier pressure. Note, you could increase Texture to around 60 or 70 to create a brush that would rarely push color into the crevices, or decrease Texture to around 10 or 20 to create a variation that easily colors the depths of the canvas.

To learn more about the traditional hake brush used by watercolorists, please see my earlier post "Making a (Digital) Hake Brush - Part 1."

Free download

I encourage you to try this digital hake brush and adjust it to fit your painting style. It's easy to add brushes to Rebelle: just copy the image below to your computer, and then drag and drop it into the Watercolor brush section of Rebelle (or, use the Import Brush Preset command in the Watercolor brush section).

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Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and that it inspires you to enjoy digital painting. If you find this post helpful, please share it with your friends. And please send me your insights on digital painting and suggestions for Digital Paint Spot.

Bob Kruschwitz