Painting Porcelain with Squirrel Hair Paint Brushes

Video Transcript

"I'd like to tell you about the brushes that we use in porcelain painting. For the smooth brushes, we generally use a pure squirrel hair. It's a much finer bristle, and it makes for a soft stroke. And I'll show you what that's like. Kind of condition my brush, which always means you're working the medium through your brush. When it stays together like that, it's ready to go. Show you with some red. This is a smooth brush. Now I'm going to show you, another thing we use are synthetic brushes. And these are what you find at your craft stores that people use for oil painting on canvas and they are talon, camel, things like that. They're usually a pretty smooth and fine brush but they don't have the consistency, which I'll show you here. You always squeeze the excess oil out, as the squirrel does. You put it on and I'm going to tip it up. This is a much more even coat, where as with the synthetic, it's a much more scratchy coat. And the reason is, we use the synthetic more as a wipe out tool. So if you want to come in and lighten something and you clean it, you can wipe it out. But as you can see the brush strokes, much easier here than you can here. These are great little wipe out brushes because you can get a pure, clear white wipe out. So we use both brushes to achieve the looks we want. And when you're finished, you can clean them out either with your oil, your medium, like this, or the Turpenoid. Again, if you have a lot of paint on your brush, it's easier to use the Turpenoid because you can spare your oil. The medium oil sometimes gets a little bit expensive. "