Picking Oil Paint Brushes

Video Transcript

"Hello. I'm Stevie Moore. Welcome to my studio at the Artist's Attic in Lexington, Kentucky. Now I'd like to explain to you a little bit about some of the brushes we are going to be using today for our wooded scene in oil. There's three factors, three attributes that every brush has that you need to take into account when selecting it and using it. First would be size. Second would be shape of the brush. And the third would be the size of the bristles of the brush. The first types of brushes that we have are going to be our square brushes. And I have several sizes of square brushes. I have a large, fine bristle. And I have two different sized mediums. And I have a very interesting flat brush, that has sort of a mitered cut on it, it's also good for detailing. And then a small, stubbier flat brush. These, all these brushes have fine bristles. Soft and smooth bristles are good for glazing. They are good for moist strokes with very wet, thin paint. They don't hold as much paint as a stiffer bristled brush and they also don't give as much texture as a stiff bristle brush. These two brushes I have here are two different shaped brushes that I now use for dry brushing. This is sort of a medium bristled, and this is a very, very soft, plastic bristled brush. This is actually a water color brush. It's very good for dry brushing and blending, which we'll see later in the painting. These are my round brushes and I'm going mainly use for line work and detail work. I've got two larger ones and then I've got three of different sizes and shapes. One that?s a, basically, a very small square brush, and then I have two round brushes here that I've selected for fine detail work. I'm going use some stiff bristled brushes. I've got three here. I've got a square that is large in size. I've got a square that is medium in size with coarse bristles. And I've got a square that is rounded, and not just rounded but it's almost cone-shaped. These are good for texturing and for building up layers of paint, and also good for doing a lot of dotted work. We'll see a technique that I'll use in this painting. I've got two different sizes fan brushes. I've got a medium and a large fan brush. These can hold a lot of paint, but they also are very selective in where they place the paint on the canvas. You can do some interesting tricks with fan brushes as well. Then I have to two liner brushes, used for making lines. A couple of other tools that I'll be using today are two types of palette knives. I've got a large palette knife and a small palette knife. They're metal palette knives. And it's always good to have a razor blade handy. And of course, you'll need some type of pencil, be it charcoal, graphite, the lighter the better because it's going to mix in with your paint. You don't want too much pigment mixing in. And an eraser is always good to have when we actually go into the drawing, which we're going to do next on our canvas."