How to choose brushes for your Oil Painting?
How to choose brushes for your Oil Painting?
The brushes we recommend for the beginner are china bristle brushes. They're tough and durable, and they make a strong mark on the canvas. They're tough enough to stand up to the oil paint and still clean up nicely. China bristle brushes are made from natural hair from pigs, and the fibers are a pale beige color.
You can also find synthetic bristle brushes that work very well, but make sure that they're made for oil paints. Technology has greatly improved the quality and affordability of brushes in the past several years. You can now find a wide variety of synthetic bristle brushes that work for oil paints and provide years of service at a good price.
Don't let low cost rule the choices that you make. You can find inexpensive brushes, but don't get the bargain multi-pack brushes that you may find in stores. The hairs will warp in all directions or fall out and become a permanent part of your painting. They're no bargain.
Aside from china bristle brushes, you'll also see sable brushes. They're softer and more delicate and very expensive. The brushes are made with animal hair or synthetic versions of those fibers. Sables are great for blending, glazing, and making soft, less-defined marks. They take more care than the china bristle brushes. After cleaning them, you have to reshape the bristles to prevent the hairs from becoming permanently warped.
The two characteristics you notice in any brush are shape and size. The different shapes allow to you load paint onto the brush and apply the paint in specific ways. Choose the size of the brush according to the size of your painting.
Selecting brush shapes
Here's a list of the brush shapes that will be most useful to you:
Flat: This brush has a clean, straight edge for applying color evenly to an area.
Bright: A bright is similar to a flat, but it has shorter bristles and makes a distinct calligraphic mark.
Round: You generally use this brush for drawing and any type of line.
Filbert: Filberts are interesting almond-shaped brushes that make an ovalish mark; they look like the round and the flat got together and had a baby.
You can also find other types of brushes that are used for specific purposes. For example, fan brushes are used for blending and textures, and long liner brushes are used for lettering. You can experiment with the brushes and find the size and shape that suit your working methods.
Brushes are sized by numbers based on the width of the brush at the ferrule, the metal sleeve that holds the hairs in place. For the projects in this book, your best choices are a #2 round and two or three others brushes either filberts, flats, or brights in sizes #4 through #8.
Choosing the right brush size
The size of the brush has a relationship to the size of your painting surface, so you need a brush that makes a mark in proportion to the overall size of the format. That means that a brush that's 2 inches wide is designed for a canvas that's at least 2 or 3 feet in either direction. For a 14-x-18-inch canvas, sizes #3 to #6 are best. For a 6-x-9-inch canvas, you need smaller brushes, and for a large canvas of 3 x 4 feet or more, you need very large brushes.
The way you apply paint, your preferred size of brush, and the shape of the brush are very much individual choices. Some brushes will get you started, and after three or four paintings, you'll find that you prefer a particular shape. Then go out and get more! You'll still need a variety of shapes. Rounds are great for drawing lines, but not for filing in large areas of color. A large flat fills in areas very well, but you have little control over the types of marks it makes.
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