How to Select Watercolor Brushes

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about how to select watercolor brushes. It's something, it's a decision that you will live with for a very long time. And because they last forever and ever, but if you go to a store you see literally hundreds of brushed ahead of you and it says well buy this, buy that. How do you make those decisions? Let's talk about it in a very simple fashion because for watercolors you don't need a great many brushes. However if you paint for long enough you will surely accumulate them because it's so much fun to have different kinds of brushes to work with. First of all, it's very easy to see the difference between a flat, thusly, or a round. Tada! And we have big ones and middle sized ones, we have little biddy, biddy, biddy ones. So how do you go about choosing something like that. We also have something really big, called a mop which this one has lost its shape right now, but this is made of I think squirrel hair all these different brushes are made some from synthetics, some from animal hair, mixed with synthetics and some from all animal hair and they all have different tasks that they can perform. If you have something like this a mop, you can cover a vast amount of territory. Frank Webb a well known artist says you have to ruin acres of paper before you become a painter. And this brush will help you ruin it even sooner because you can cover a lot of territory. But a little brush like this long hairs, but not very many of them, is called a rigger and the reason for having riggers was that when you were painting a ship, long ago you had to do all the rigging on the ships so if you got a rigger really wet, you can go make very fine lines, and yet go for a pretty long way, it will hold a lot of paint. And you can paint for a long distance with the one little brush. You could sign your name with it and so on. Some of these riggers will let you paint for about a mile before they run out of water. When you dump your brushes in whatever you are putting them into, you're remembering of course that you are going to be dealing with water all the time. Don't let your brushes sit in the water because a very bad thing can happen. And I'll show you, you can lose the paint down close to the ferial on your brushes. And therefore, sometimes this metal part that holds the animal hair or the synthetic hair will get very loose and you really don't want that to happen. This is a good brush, but unfortunately it's a little bit wobbly. So another kind of brush is a what some people call a sign painting brush and that's something like this, that can hold a great deal of paint and almost like the rigger can, but you can make letters, have very controlled edges if you were painting walls or something like that, or lines, that will help you do that very, very easily. Because you, you have a long brush which can hold water but it's not going to go all over the place. A round brush, even though it may be quite large can still get, can still make a, I wish this were wetter. I can't paint with dry paint. This round brush can also make a very fine line not as fine as a rigger, but it can, it can either cover a very large surface or a small one. And we can meld other paints into that and move them all around. So any kind of brush that you use is going to work. You can also paint with twigs, you can paint with your fingers, you can paint with the back of credit cards. You can use the backs of some of your brushes to dig into the paint and the paint will settle into those holes or you can even pull paint out this way. So there's so many different things you can use sponges, you can drop, you can you know any number of other qualities can be brought about by using different brushes and different paints. So the best thing to do is just get a few brushes, get some paint and get started. My name is Eileen Pestorius and I hope you've enjoyed learning a little bit about paint brushes."