Making (Digital) Creamy Acrylic Brushes - Part 1

"Debbie's Field" (detail)

 The “Acrylic” brushes in Rebelle make rather thin and scruffy marks off the shelf. In this post, I’ll show you how to adjust those brushes to make thick and creamy marks, like those in "Debbie’s Field" (detail) above.

The beauty of traditional acrylic painting is that color can be applied in a variety of ways, ranging from transparently thin glazes to textured impasto layers. It all depends on the proportion of water to paint and how soft or hard are the brush bristles.

This wide range of marks can be emulated in Rebelle software.

The two ways to simulate an acrylic glaze are straightforward and intuitive. (Always remember to paint the glaze on a new layer so that you do not disturb paint already on the canvas.) One method is to lightly paint with lots of water and very little pigment on an Acrylic brush in Rebelle. (The Water and Loading, as they are called, can be adjusted easily on the Acrylic Tools Panel. Try Water = 100 and Loading = 10.) Another method (and it’s the one I prefer), is to wet the desired area with the Water tool first and then lightly brush over it with the Acrylic brush at normal settings.

Simulating a textured impasto layer in Rebelle is more complicated and counterintuitive. One easy adjustment is just increasing the water without decreasing the load on an Acrylic brush in Rebelle. The mark becomes a bit smoother as the added water blends the bristle marks:

Unfortunately, the most helpful strategies to produce thick and creamy marks involve adjusting the Acrylic brush in Rebelle’s Brush Creator Panel. However, it’s very distracting to tinker with the Brush Creator while you are painting. So, I suggest that you experiment beforehand to find the settings you prefer and save those as a new brush preset.

Free Download: Three Creamy Brushes 

To save you some time, here are three creamy brushes that I use all the time in preference to the Rebelle original Acrylic brushes. I encourage you to try these brushes and adjust them to fit your painting style. It's easy to add brushes to Rebelle: just copy the three images below to your computer, and then drag and drop them into the Acrylic brush section of Rebelle (or, use the Import Brush Preset command in the Acrylic brush section).

Cream 1 brush

Cream 1 ns brush

Cream 2 brush

The Cream 1, Cream 1 ns, and Cream 2 brushes make these crosshatch marks, respectively:

The Cream 1 and Cream 1 ns brushes have the same parameters, except the former brush has Smudge “on” and the latter one has Smudge “off.” (“NS” in the name stands for “no smudge.”) The smudge effect can make the first brush lag a bit at larger sizes. So, to paint large areas of canvas quickly, I sometimes use the second (no smudge) brush and then smooth out the mark with a soft Blender.
Continue reading the next post, "Making (Digital) Creamy Acrylic Brushes - Part 2," to understand the parameters of each of these brushes and to see how you might modify them in several useful ways.

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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