Every artist can confirm that the more you love the tools you’re working with, the easier it is to transfer your ideas into art. To end up working with brushes you love, you must make more informed, better decisions when shopping for new painting brushes. Many art brush types are available today, making it challenging for beginner artists to find the right ones for their creative needs and painting styles.
What Is the Best Brush to Use for Painting?
When you’re browsing through the assortment of artist brush sets for your next project, you need to carefully examine the shape, size, and fibre type to determine which one will work best for your painting technique. Depending on your technique and what you plan to create, you may prioritise different characteristics over others.
Brush Shapes, Hair and Applications
Round
Round-shaped models are one of the most regularly used in painting. It’s a versatile tool for any painter, artist, or designer who applies pigment to a surface. It comes in various sizes and bristle kinds (hog, sable, pony, and more, as well as their synthetic versions).
They come with blunt and pointy tips, each having a varied suitability for painting. Pointed-tipped models are perfect for detailing and providing varying line weights based on the artist’s pressure. Blunt-tipped rounds make scratchy, rough patterns ideal for filling in colour when used at a side angle in a scribbling motion.
Flat
This is another versatile option, working best for washes, especially in a larger size. When painting with acrylic or watercolour, it’s often thicker to pick up a larger pigment amount. You can get it wet before picking up the paint, allowing the application of thinner layers of pigment to a surface more quickly. Wash brushes often have a squared side edge, indicating they can produce regulated strokes with a solid edge if used with opaque pigments.
Smaller flat brushes use a longer bristle length to smoothly lay flat spots of colour, resulting in a squared edge. They’re also great for creating long, smooth strokes that convey a sense of gesture and motion in the application paint. If you use high-quality oil or acrylic paints, they can help you effectively accentuate the pigment’s deep hue. If you use their shorter sides, they can create solid lines of varied thicknesses based on weight.
Bright
Next up is another type of flat bristled brush, with its own distinct characteristics. Brights provide higher surface resistance due to their shorter bristle length, making them perfect for applying short, powerful colour strokes. The stiffness of the bristles varies according to the fibre, but brights are often one of the hardest models in your arsenal, great for producing hard-edged textures with heavy colour.
Filbert
Filberts have long bristles with a flat tip, making them midway between the flat and round shape. The main difference between a filbert and a flat brush lies in their rounded edges, which means they can create softer marks.
They come in various lengths and fibre kinds, thus different filberts provide diverse outcomes. The favourite among figurative painters enables the artist to create a range of marks depending on the relationship between their hand and the brush.
On the other hand, a filbert can create flat colour fields with no apparent brush marks. And when used with dry pigment on the tip, it can provide scratchy textures and blurred borders between fields of colour. Although that’s true for many shapes, the specific arrangement of bristles in a filbert gives a surface an expressive, artistic impression.
Mottler
Available in both synthetic and organic fibres, this type of brush has a wide range of uses throughout the painting process. Mottlers can effectively prepare a surface for priming because they hold a significant amount of pigment. They’re also good for colour-blocking, underpainting and applying varnish to a large surface area. This artist brush type can also produce many effects associated with other flat types, frequently used on a bigger scale or to cover a greater surface area.
Mop
Mop brushes have soft bristles and a rounded tip; they’re commonly linked with watercolour painting but can be used with different paints. When used with watercolour, they provide an excellent shape for covering vast sections of the surface with thin paint, known as a wash. They’re especially suitable for mixing oil paints, softening edges, and making portions of a painting fit together more organically, such as varied hues of clouds in the sky.
It’s also useful for glazing since its soft bristles and rounded tip prevent unattractive brush marks or hard edges while applying glaze. When used dry, they can successfully apply water transfers without damaging the surface.
Angled
Angled brushes are one of the most versatile shapes in a painter’s studio; while they’re often disregarded when purchased as part of a set, their inclusion is useful and required.
Their design allows for swift transitions between thin and broad lines, making them an excellent alternative for those looking to paint the natural landscape or other organic materials. They can be beneficial for creating texture, blocking an area of colour, and creating motion in grass blades.
Additionally, their shape can aid in the transition from a desk to an easel. This option offers a greater sensation of control when working on an upright surface, providing comfort when using the fine end for detailed artwork or text.
Fan
Fan brushes have soft bristles and, as the name suggests, are shaped like a classic hand fan. The bristles are often thinner and not thickly coated to prevent gathering up too much pigment. That makes them an excellent shape for blending paint already on the surface, especially in areas where you want a blurred appearance or to make a gradient transition appear smooth and delicate.
They work equally well as a texture brush. In addition to traditional strokes, fan forms can be applied to a surface in various ways. Because of the wide spacing of the bristles, applying paint in different motions with this option can be a helpful technique for producing a sense of depth or motion in mixed-media work. You can also use them to create stippling or splattering effects by tapping the pigment into the surface.
