Types of Brushes & Canvas to Use for Landscape Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Hail and on behalf of Expert Village I'm gonna show you today how to do a landscape painting. A special word on a couple of the supplies you're gonna be using today. And the first is on the canvas that you select to paint on. There are all sorts of different types of canvases out there. If you're painting a lot, you can get your own canvas and stretch it and wood frame it that's great, but a lot of art stores will sell canvases like this which already have the wood framing around the side, it's ready to go. Another thing to look for on your canvases is is it pre-treated, does it need to be? What is pre-treatment? Pre-treatment is a material they call Gesso. Basically what it is is they will put in a very thin layer of it on your stretched canvas. What this will do is it will basically kind of help the paint interact with the canvas, not just seep right through, absorb it, it will help it over time. That's something to keep in mind because a lot of these canvases come pre-treated and it will say so on the label. Another thing I wanted to cover in more detail are brushes and the types of brushes we'll be using. There are a lot of different types of brushes, an entire variety of them out there. Again, if you are painting on occasion a lot of art stores will have some very economic options for you out there. But let's cover the different types of brushes that are out there. While there are a whole lot of them, you can get things, brushes are made from everything, from animal hair, there are synthetics out there now a days. A lot of people have some pretty strong opinions on those. In my experience, it's all kind of what you're going for. Really the most important thing is the artist using the brush, rather than whether or not it's rabbit hair or goat hair in your brush. That said, I do think that shape is very important on brushes in the type of effects you're going for. So, we're gonna cover the three main types of brushes and a specialty brush. The first are just simply called round. Rounded brushes. This is very simple. They're round, they make a circular shape at the top and these are really, really good for smoothing edges, not where you want really, really harsh tones. These come in a variety of sizes. The smaller ones will tend to have more of a point to 'em, which is better for detail work. The next brush are flats. This is this 'cause it's a flat top right across the side there, you got 90 degree angles on each side there. These are really good for specially being your more forceful brush strokes. They are also really good for kind of wedging or dragging color around your canvas on. Definitely a little more of a course, sort of setting in the infantry of brushes. The next one is a philbert, which in some ways is a kind of a hybrid between the round and the flat, meaning that it's still still pretty flat like the flat brush here, it's not super thick, but at the same time it doesn't have the square top. It has a little more of a tapered, slightly rounded edge, kind of more 45 degree angle. And again, you can get these brushes in a variety of sizes. Generally the more detail work you wanna do the smaller the brush you want. Another specialty brush I wanted to cover is the fan brush over here. The fan brush is really cool. It can do lots of sort of like neat dragging, very fluttery dry brushing effects, where you just may want just a hint of sunshine, or a highlight on say a leaf, or some water or a person's face. It's really, really great because you get a nice wide, very thin swaf of color with things like a fan brush. "