Hello Painters!!
Most important tool you need to start painting are the Brushes. It is a bamboozling experience when it’s your first time.
This article will help you out to choose the right brush for the right brush technique.
The Basic Brush Types are:
Sable: Sable brushes are for oil paint, they are soft and springy. These are the same as sable watercolor brushes except for longer handles. Soft hair brushes are not essential to oil painting, however they can be very useful in blending or for small finishing details.
Synthetic: Synthetic brushes are very good and are an economical alternative to natural bristle brushes. However less expensive ones will lose their shape quickly due to heavy paint on textured canvas.
Palette Knife: Generally a metal knife with a thin flexible blade, used by artists for mixing, scraping, or applying paint.
House Painting Brush: Can be used for covering large areas quickly and can also be used to Gesso a raw canvas. House painting brushes are manufactured with natural and syntactic bristles and can be manufactured for use with oil, latex (water based paint, good for Acrylics) and some for use with both.
Toothbrushes: Old toothbrushes can be used for painting speckled effects, little droplets of paint created by putting some paint on the toothbrush and then flicking the bristles toward the painting.
The Basic Brushes Shape are:
Rounds: They can hold a lot of paint due to their large belly and that makes them great for loading with a lot of thick paint for large bold strokes or marks. These brushes are ideal for blocking in the basic shapes and forms of the paintings composition at the first stage of a painting.
Flats: They can make long fluid strokes when used flat or delicate thin lines or marks when the edge is used.
Brights: They dig deeper into the paint and leave sharp rectangular marks. they are used for applying thick heavy paint in impasto painting and they are better at creating detail as they are easier to control then the longer bristle flats.
Filberts: Filbert bristle brushes are a blend of the Rounds and the Flats. Due to the tip being shaped to a curve they are easier to control for blending and softening edges.
Fans: There is nothing better for blending or feathering wet paint to create smooth highly finished results. They are excellent for blending the soft edges of clouds.
Basic Brush Techniques are:
Gradient Blending: Blending two colors creating a gradient transition from one to another. This can be done with any brush, however a Fan bristle brush is best
Wet into Wet: Start by painting a solid field of color1, while the field is still wet, paint strokes of color2 on top. Use the same size brush spaced out to create a gradient effect.
Stumbling: You can dip your brush into the paint push it strait into the canvas so that the bristles splay out, then the brush is rotated slightly creating a mottled effect.
Optical Mixing: Create evenly spaced strokes of pure color, randomly spaced. Start with the color1 paint and allow it to dry complexly (this could take over night in the case of oils). Then with the same size brush, create the same randomly placed evenly spaced color2 brush strokes creating a optical mix of both.
Here are some of the strokes and brush types that can help you in your paintings.
Happy Painting 🙂
