Types of Brushes for Oil Painting

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Vince Fazio and I'm here to talk to you from the Sedona art center about one session oil paintings. I use an assortment of brushes. I love painting large as well as small. These are brushes I use on the small scale paintings. A bristle filbert brush... a little bit longer than and a bit rounded as compared to a flat. This is a flat. These two are larger for this scale of painting; you can see it's a decent size brush. And they'll be used for blocking in and beginning the process. Also, this shader angle brush is one of my favorites. I often find myself using it on end though. This little flat thin comes in really handy toward the end of the painting. This is the one I depend on. And it's a pretty soft brush. A soft brush is good for putting paint on top of other paint. A bristle brush that's a bit thicker is going to scrape into the paint. It's got a bit more spring to it, it's got thicker hairs, and it's going to scrape into the paint, mixing the under paint with the over paint. So the soft brush will be used more toward the end. Palate knives.... sometimes I paint with these. Often, I mix paint with these. And these are good for mixing paint because with a brush your grabbing paint in a different way and it's not as clean. A palate knife is a very clean way of mixing your paint. A palate knife is also easy to clean. One of the tools that I didn't mention yet is a paper towel. Watch this....that's easy to clean compared to a brush. So, you can mix with the palate knife. And you can also see how flat that color shows up on the palate. And it really lets you see exactly what color you have there and you can kind of visually match that with what you're doing. If you're working from a photograph as we're going to be working in a minute you can put some of that paint on the palate knife and hold it right up to the photograph to look at what you've got."