 Well, hi there, it's Sandy Olnock and this is the painting I'm going to do later on in this video But we're going to do some discussion of brushes first. So if you're interested in the difference between brushes, stay tuned In honor of World Watercolor Month, I thought I would have a little chit chat with you about brushes and The synthetic versus natural hair brushes and I bought some brushes so I could test some things out right here for you And these are my silver brush black velvet round It's just the 8 and the 12 that I typically recommend for crafters because they're inexpensive and they work pretty well They hold up pretty well and there's nothing wrong with them I'm not saying you need to buy something other than this if these are the brushes you have Necessarily, there's just some others you may want to add to your collection. The Windsor and Newton series 7 are amazing brushes I have this number 10 that is my absolute favorite and I found a number 8 that was on sale And I bought one because I needed a little friend for it and it came in this lovely box it's a natural hair brush and You know as all good brushes do they come with a little cap on them take that off and then the brush itself is Stiff don't break that with your fingers. It's not a wise idea, especially when you've got a brush That's this pricey This one was a hundred and something the bigger one is like two hundred and something so you don't want to break anything You also can preserve your brushes much longer if you dry them horizontally Don't put it in a cup facing upward so that all of that water goes down into the silver portion of the brush That will make it so all your bristles eventually fall out So you don't want to do that when you put it in the water though. Just let the water do the work until the Bristles start to soften and and the brush starts to melt out and let the water Let the water do all that work. So here are my two new best friends I'm excited to try them. You can see one is longer than the other etc But I'm curious to see how well this eight will make its way into my normal painting These are some of my larger brushes that are Da Vinci maestro It's their line that I love of natural hair brushes as well And I found this little pack and I was so excited about it It was like 77 bucks for a 12 10 and an 8 and it said on it that it was Kalinsky's and I had thought the word Kalinsky meant that it was natural. It says sable on it I'm like, I don't know what a usury is but I Just figured okay now. I have to go figure out what this thing is. It's a rotten martyr Is what it says on a Kalinsky rot martyr now my maestro is the one at the top that's the expensive brush and I wanted to compare the 12 in the Da Vinci maestro to the 12 in the rot martyr and I Had some hope for it other than being a little bit shorter on the bristles It seemed like you know little slightly smaller of a brush, but maybe it would have some possibilities I don't really know We will find out later in this video when I try out these three brushes But before we get to testing I want to show you two other brushes for making thin lines So whether it's tiny branches or power lines or barbed wire that sort of thing If you find yourself having subject matter that requires it Here's two options. The lesser option is this Princeton aqua elite. It's a synthetic brush I got the long 12 Really reasonably priced does a reasonable but not excellent job The one that I love is my Da Vinci maestro inlaid long needle sharp liner Kalinsky size 9 It's a natural hairbrush again It's gonna be expensive because of that But the coolest part about it is it has this nice big belly on it And then it fans out in the middle and then down to this fine point and when it's wet You can kind of see how it functions all of that Water and pigment is held in the belly and then it is funneled down to the tip So what I did was take all the brushes that I wanted to test for you side by side No, this is not my entire collection of brushes. I have more. I know it's an obsession But I broke it into my 8s my 10s and my 12s and I'm gonna add another one to this and that's going to be a 14 in Da Vinci they have a Line of their synthetics that I do like called Casaneo and It's a nice big brush So if you find yourself in need of a larger brush and you don't know what to get that could be a possibility for you But I want to do some side-by-side testing so that I can explain a little bit about what I love about the natural hair brushes and I've mixed up some paint This is a new color from Daniel Smith and it is called the Thalo blue turquoise. I Mixed up enough of it that I could get through this whole exercise with the same amount of water and pigment mixture So I'd have some apples to apples to test so starting out with a silver brush It didn't go very far With this number eight It doesn't have enough body to it to hold much and the silver brushes also tend to reserve more in the brush And they just kind of hold on to it so you don't end up expelling all of the color You end up putting a lot of it back in your water The number eight in the Windsor Newton series seven This is the new brush that I just unboxed for you and it works quite nicely It put out plenty of color. You can see one load of color Did a lot more with that brush than it did with the silver and now let's try out this Rotten martyr thing from to Benji and I was amazed at how fast It put out the color. I like bad a boom bad a bing. It didn't hold as much I had to go back for seconds, but it just pours out color like just releases it as soon as it hits the paper and my natural hair brushes tend to do it over time as opposed to Doing it all in one fell swoop and the silver holds back on me So I have to kind of press a little harder with the silver brush But I did make it all the way through the whole swatch with the number 10 because it's a bigger brush It holds more so with a little bit of pressure. I was able to get more color out of it This is my favorite brush my Windsor Newton series seven and I get beautiful edges with my natural brushes as well Just they don't end up being blobby edges They end up being these beautiful broken distressed edges, which I use all the time when I'm painting Now here's another of the rot martyrs again. You can see the puddles just pouring off of it You may find that that's not a big deal in general because the the end product looks fine But technique wise you may find That you have to change things up depending on the kind of brush you have now This is a Castanello by Da Vinci and it's another other synthetic ones It's they the one I told you was a synthetic line that I find pretty decent for synthetics And it push puts out a lot of that water immediately as well Now this is the silver 12 and it puts out a lot because I've got a big brush It's a 12 and you know that one it still doesn't do the great edges But it does put out a lot more color This is the Da Vinci maestro another one of those expensive natural hair brushes Again, I can get the nice edges along with getting enough pigment out of the brush onto the paper and Finally the 12 in the rot martyr just looking at like there's puddles immediately as soon as you touch it to the paper So I'm in my mind while I'm doing this trying to figure out What's that going to do to my painting techniques or is there anything it's going to do to my painting techniques? And I just wanted to get busy doing some some painting and trying it out In terms of big brushes, this is a 14 in the Da Vinci maestro line. So that is a natural bristle brush and then compared that to a Castanello and While the end result looks Roughly the same. I still find the same thing I get drag and I get a little more work coming in with Synthetic brushes than I do the natural brushes So there's just there's a pull on the paper with synthetics that you don't get with natural hair brushes Now these are the two brushes for what I call calligraphy just doing a little line work and this is the one that I absolutely love and It does amazing little tiny fine lines as well as big blobby areas Again, it's gonna be an expensive brush, but it does a beautiful job This is that Princeton aqua elite the one I told you is really inexpensive and you can work at it to get a lighter thinner line and If you're just getting started, it's probably not worth getting a really expensive brush just for that one particular feature So I think you can make do with the other The brushes I'm going to be using for classes at least right now are going to be the silver eight the Windsor Newton 10 and Then these two brushes. I'll be using for fine details But I recommend getting at least one bigger brush Don't try to do a giant painting with a little silver number eight That's just not going to be enough to get enough paint onto the paper when you're talking about a large sheet And when I say large sheet, I paint in quarter sheets and my classes my my brand new Watercolor classes on painting trees are going to be on quarter sheets, which means a big sheet of 22 by 30 Cut in half and then cut in half again So it's a quarter of that and in order to quote unquote cut them I just fold it back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until I Kind of break that crease and can tear it so I get rough edges on them And do the same thing the other direction and it ends up being on a sheet like this I use white tape instead of colored tape just because then I don't get distracted by seeing my color Next to like crazy blue or crazy green or whatever color So I use white artist tape Now what i'm using here is the brushes the rottmarter brushes that i'm testing out Just to see what the feel is like and the color in the sky is the rest of that Phthalo blue turquoise that I was using for my swatches because I had it I don't necessarily think the Phthalos are going to survive my palette next time when I change colors out I don't find I use Phthalos very often although this one has more possibilities than others However, I love cobalt for skies. So I think I might be okay Without having this color in there. I don't really know yet. I don't have to make that decision quite yet But these brushes, this is the number 12 that I have been painting with so far And my assessment of what it feels like It's it's a feel rather than what it does at the moment And until I paint with something a number of times It's hard to really judge Exactly what it's doing and what I like or don't like about it aside from There's drag on these brushes that I don't have with my My good sable natural hair brushes It's just you know, it's a different feel When you're painting and I've gotten to the point where If I don't have that good feeling I don't tend to paint well But if it feels like it's going on like butter Then I get all kinds of exciting about it. It's just something tactile that I love The brush puts out color as I said You know gushes it out right away So I don't get some of the subtleties that I would get with my better brushes But I don't know that that's really all that much of a problem in the way that I paint because I do everything in layers If you've seen my Copic work, I do that in layers. I do pencil work in layers. I do watercolor in layers And I can usually recover those kinds of things And if you're going to take one of my foundations watercolor classes Uh, I I think you could probably do fine with with this brush But you also May decide you want a nicer brush. I don't really know it's up to you And what level you're at is going to determine whether or not you feel it's worth spending a lot of money on brushes You know, I I'm kind of turning into a brush snob. I realize Over time and I used to laugh at people who did that Thinking, you know, I just want a cheap brush that works But I've found that cheap brushes do different things than expensive brushes I did some testing out of spattering Because for me, that's kind of a test to see how much will fling off of a brush That tells me how how well it releases color And these did a fair job of that. So that wasn't bad This is the small brush out of the trio in that set And yeah, it's not bad. It's it's doing the job And getting the job done is really all you can ask for from a brush One of my mentors actually makes brushes himself Out of these brushes he gets for $1.49 at the hardware store He cuts the bristles to these weird lengths so that he can scrub them around on his paper and make these amazing trees that he creates And it kind of taught me that you can paint with a stick and be just fine if that's what you've got So make it work now these two Brushes that I told you about with the line work. This one is the Princeton aqua elite And I did get a good bit of tiny branches done with that as you can see It does a fairly decent job of that if you paint very gently with it Don't get heavy And this brush also does some really good Dry brush because it's so flipping stiff It just it loves to just glaze over the top of the paper and not do a consistent stroke and it gives you Some dry brush that other brushes may not because they're too soft So each brush that you own may have a different place in your art It's your job to find out what that place is. What does it do well? and How you can replicate whatever it is that it does well Figure out what the consistency of the pigment needs to be in order to make it do that thing So that you can replicate that particular effect again So it's this one's allowing me to get lots more detail in here than the Rotmarter number eight because I'm getting a different shape of brush stroke In order to do this So this one is that expensive Sable needle brush And I just love this thing. I love the kinds of little lines. I can make with it I hold it way back at the end So that I don't end up getting too particular with it making tight controlled lines But boy, it allows me to Loosen up and make some elegant kind of squiggle lines, which I find really beautiful I use this brush a lot for branches as you see also for grasses for Telephone wires lots of things like that because I can get A lot of paint into that big barrel of the brush Uh, a lot of it requires holding the brush vertically Which is an a whole different feel that I had to get used to because gravity has to pull the paint out of that Belly of the brush and drop it down onto the paper So that is something to get used to if you end up buying this brush for yourself But look at all of this lovely detail I can get By using this brush. It's gorgeous. I love those grasses This particular painting by the way is not my standard painting I'm painting it quite quickly even though this is sped up about two times What normal would be I just wanted to Make a quick painting to test this out so that I could show you How I test brushes and the kinds of paces that I put them through as opposed to Trying to make one of my paintings that will take me forever Now this is the difference between the kind of line I can get from the Princeton aqua elite And it was fine to do it worked But it's quite heavy compared to the little fine lines that I got from the needle brush And it really depends on what kinds of things you paint if you're going to have a use For a brush like that on any regular basis And if if you do then it's well worth having that brush But if you really only are going to do that kind of detail work and that kind of Line work, you know twice a year. I wouldn't say that a brush like that is Worthy expense necessarily So at this point, I'm running around with my Princeton aqua elite to add in Some rich dark colors some of the shadows in the leaves That sort of thing run back in again with my needle brush To add in more fine details back to the Princeton aqua elite And I go back and forth with my brushes trying to use the brush That's going to achieve what I want to paint Not really worrying about any rules but trying to think of the look of the stroke that I want to get So finished painting with all of the tape peeled off Is I think one that would pass the test for these brushes. They're not my favorites They're ones that I could say yes, you could paint with you could definitely do Worse than these for sure and for the price. I think they're actually not bad So there you go. I'm going to have links to all of the brushes in the doobly-doo down below So you can check that out as well as a link to my foundations class on trees Thank you so much. I will see you again very soon. Bye. Bye