My Christmas Wish List #4: Rebelle 3 -- Digital Art Program

My Christmas Wishlist #4

This year my Christmas Wish List includes Rebelle 3 from Escape Motions. You may know that I already have Rebelle 3 on my computer. So why include it on my wish list? Right now I don't have full capability of the program right now. It

To read more about the program you can go here: https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/ There is both a downloadable demo, and an online demo for this product.

Created digitally with Rebelle 3's  pastels
and inked with Clip Studio Paint

I like Rebelle 3 for many reasons. I have used Photoshop extensively. At this point I cant afford to buy a subscription for Photoshop. I'm not sure that Photoshop is right for me anymore. I'm use to using traditional methods for my art and Rebelle 3 seems to be the best at mimicking watercolors. If you are talking about oil painting Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter are decent digital substitutes.

Watercolor: Rebelle 3 has a fascinating way of creating realistic watercolors. It allows you to put water on the canvas and your colors to blend in a way that's very much like actual watercolors. You can pause the reaction with the water and instantly dry or wet your entire canvas. There is more of a chance for mistakes and fun discovery with this program compared to other programs I've seen.

Pastel: I think this is my favorite for black and white images. I don't use pastels much but I love how well you can build up the pastel color. There is also a blending tool that allows pastels to look softer and (of course) blended.

Ink: I like the options that you have for inking. Much like the watercolors you can use water you can blend the inks. With these digital inks (like traditional inks) the colors are fairly fixed after they dry. India ink is the same way, so if you want to be able to change the colors after the fact, then you'd go with watercolor rather than ink. If I could change anything about this I'd want a bit of a stabilizer for ink so its easier to draw using a tablet.

Eraser: This one is fun, because it basically reverts your paper back to normal! It's not that impressive when it comes to pencil, but when you have 15 layers of watercolor down it's kind of awesome to remove them and start back at the beginning.

Other Media: Rebelle 3 also has acrylics, pencil, markers and spray paint available for use. I have not used any of these extensively so will not comment at this time on their uses.


The "bad" thing about the program is it is very memory intensive (see website for more details on system requirements). You have to have a lot of RAM on your computer for it to run well. I have 8 gigs of ram on my computer and a decent graphics card. While it can run on 8 gigs, this program is best with 12 - 16 gigs. The amount of undos are limited to 1 with a 10.5" x 16.5" image with 4-5 layers (the size I use for picture book spreads). An 8" x 10" (or slightly larger) doesn't seem to have many issues. I'm hoping to get more RAM soon!

Edit: I also forgot to mention that with 8 gigs of ram it's not possible to run Chrome or other software. You can, but the Rebelle software is very likely to crash or have other problems if you do so. Often I'm running near the top of what my computer can handle without opening anything else!

Where to buy:

Both Escape Motions and Smith Micro sells this software. The difference I've noticed between the two is the availability of software download after the fact. With Smith Micro there are more sales, however the digital download is only available once with Smith Micro. An extra $13 is required to download the software for only 1 year. With Escape Motions you can download the software indefinitely so I strongly suggest ordering it through the company. For $90 USD it's not an expensive program!