Brushes – Acrylic Paintings Tools

In previous article Acrylic Paintings Tools we started with acrylic painting art supplies and covered Paint. In this article we will discuss more acrylic paintings tools.

This article will give you introduction and an idea to select paint brushes to use with acrylics.

You must use many size paint brush. In case of quality, you can choose within your budget. I would like to suggest you use the medium quality brushes. Because the best quality brushes value is very high, on the other hand the low-quality brush may fail to work appropriately.

• Parts of Brush: –

A paintbrush is made up of three parts: The handle, the ferrule, and tuft (brush hairs or bristles)

• Bristles: –

Natural Bristle is extremely soft not recommended to hold thick acrylic paints. Due to the longer length of Natural hair its mainly use for thinned colors. Source of natural brushes are Squirrel, goat, camel and pony. Hog (Pig) is a slight harder and has great for moving thick paint around the canvas.

Synthetic brushes are the vast variety of brushes are a blend of synthetic bristles and natural hair.

Natural Bristle carry more paint than synthetic bristles.

• Shapes of Bristles: –

Angular for Ribbon, marble effect etc. Flats are very useful to cover a big area of paint, the background. Round or Rigger or Liner– thin and with long bristles, great tool for sketching, outlining, detailed work, filling in small areas, painting lines or text. Filbert brush for blending or petal shapes. Fan is commonly used for texture, clouds, leaves on trees, grass etc. Bright good for short controlled strokes. thick, heavy color. Comb is for hairs, graining etc. Dear foot for animal fur, cloths etc.

Tips for Handling Brushes: –

1. Always feel your brush on your palm or finger before you start to decide brush stroke and pressure. This is to know exactly what your brushes will do.
2. Short handle is good to begin. But for longer sessions, good control and pain free act always move towards using long handle.
3. Use of small brushes which eventually leads to over concentration on detail and more experimenting at a area resulting low satisfaction even after spending much time.
4. Small brushes are useful for time bound detailing in small area.
5. Always clean your brush immediately and gently after use with clean water. Dried brush, it is ruined, never to be used again.
6. Never stand a brush on its handle when wet, this will cause water to leak down into the ferrule, loosening the glue that holds the bristles and handle.
7. Leaving brushes in water for longer time rots them.

Pallet

Non-stick surface to mix different colors of paint. Begin with acrylic or plastic pallet.

Keep it small, this helps you in doing less experiments and avoid wasting paints.
Use cotton cloth. Not very thin nor very thick, gently feel the cleaning of brush.

In my next blog I will start with painting techniques.

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