Watercolor Painting Supplies: Brushes

Series Summary

The art of watercolor painting has been practiced since the time of Egyptian antiquity in the form of fresco wall painting, a process in which water-based pigments were applied to wet plaster. Watercolor painting also has a rich history in Chinese and Japanese painting and has been used to add color to manuscripts in cultures throughout the world. What we think of as modern watercolor painting began to develop in the 1500s with Durer's landscape studies. The popularity of this medium spread and spawned many disciplines of watercolor painting, including the 17th century British school and California style of the 1920s. Interested in watercolor painting? In this free video series on watercolor painting, an award-winning artist demonstrates how to select and use a variety of watercolor painting supplies. Get tips on selecting and using watercolor paintbrushes, paints and watercolor paper. Learn about using paper towels, watercolor pencils and crayons and slide viewers. Every artist has a unique set of tools and supplies, so get tips from an expert on starting a collection of watercolor painting supplies for your next work of art.

Video Transcript

"I have big selection of brushes that I like to use. There are some brushes I just use for the little horse hairs and I don't use them for anything else. There are other brushes I use for just different aspects of the piece. What you want to do when you are looking for a watercolor brush. There are some very extraordinarily expensive brushes and there are some less expensive brushes. Obviously the more expensive brushes, the reason they are more expensive, they are made out of a better product, they hold their point longer, they just work better but you can get by on an average price brush when you start out, you don't need to dump a whole bunch of cash into supplies. Again what you would like is you would like the watercolor brush to hold a tip such as this so it can hold color and you can also work some detail on it and you can see the size difference. So based on the size of your piece if you are painting a lot larger pieces typically you will use a larger brush which makes sense, you can cover the surfaces and smaller details you will use a smaller brush and these are not watercolor brushes but again I'm a sucker for the art store. So I will go on and I'll buy different things and try them in different ways and as you can see these particular brushes have a square, are a little squared off and for me what I use these for is when I paint leather. You'll see a lot of designs in leather that revolve around weaving and things like that and I've found that these types of brushes work very well for that so buy your brushes based on what you need them for and it will work out really well for you."