Types of Brushes: Shapes and Hog Bristle, Sable, or Synthetic

        

Brush Types: 

• Round: pointed tip, long and closely arrange bristles. Good for details. 
• Flat: flat, long bristles. Good for spreading paint quickly and evenly over a surface. A dry, clean, standard flat is also excellent for blending. 
• Bright: flat, short bristles. Good for scrubbing paint into the weave of a canvas in thinner paint applications, but also ideal for thicker impasto work. 
• Filbert: flat, round tipped bristles. Good for general coverage and some detail work, ideal for creating soft edges. 
• Fan: flat, fanned bristles. Good for blending broad areas of paint, like smoothing the left image below to the right image:

• Angle: flat, with bristles cut at an angle. Good for general application as well as detail, but are a personal choice brush. 
• Mop: large, round bristles. Good for larger paint application, are usually very soft and good for blending large areas or applying larger glazes. 
• Rigger: long, round bristles that come to a sharp point. Good for fine lines and details, and although are normally marketed as a watercolor brush, they work equally well with oils. 

I highly recommend reading Wikipedia's and Dick Blick's articles about different paint brushes. You can also read more here at the Winsor and Newton site. 

Brush Hair Type: Natural Sable, Hog Bristles, or Synthetic 

The material used to form the body of the brush determines both the performance and the price of the brush. 

• Natural Sable, soft hair brushes: bristles are extremely soft and made from animal hair. Good for general paint application, but excellent for glazing. They have a long life and maintain their shape even when loaded with heavy paint.  

• The most expensive sable is the Kolinsky sable, and is made from a mink of the weasel family, found in Siberia and China. The best brushes are made of the hair of the male's tail, but only the hairs of his winter coat. Normally the mink is hunted for its tail, but there are some cases of them being raised in captivity, usually in poor conditions. In both cases they are killed. Any site saying that animals are not harmed in the making of these brushes is confused. In 2013 the US Fish and Wildlife started halting or seizing shipments of the brushes. So yeah... 

• They can also be made out of squirrel, pony, goat, mongoose, or badger. You will also see a "camel" hair option, but it is not made from a camel. These options are still not great for the whole animal rights thing... 

• Hog Bristle, corse hair brushes: bristles are thicker, stiffer, and stronger than sable hair. Easily holds a lot of paint and is great for heavy paint application or the spreading of paint. Hog hair is great for preparing a canvas ground, or imprimatura, and for moving paint along large backgrounds. Some also recommend hog bristles for glazing, but I don't. They last forever and can take a lot of abuse. 

•  Hog hair is interesting in that each tip forks off into three micro tips. This allows the brush to hold a ridiculous amount of paint. 

• Hog Bristles usually come from the ears of the pig, and yes, the pig is dead. I do use hog bristle brushes, but mixed with a moral dilemma. The entire body of the pig is used when it is slaughtered for meat, and that includes hairs for making paint brushes; however, the way the animals are kept is wrong. You can learn more here. 

• Synthetic, soft hair brushes: Synthetics were not always awesome, it is true, but now they are almost just as good as any natural hair brush. They are usually made of nylon or polyester. Here are some reasons for going synthetic: 

• They are less prone to damage from solvents, insects, or paints.   
• They are easier to keep clean than animal hair, because the filaments don't have animal scale structures to trap paint. 
• They are less prone to breakage and are more durable on various surfaces. 

So moral of the story, go synthetic! To read more about paint brushes, read here or here. I will be talking about different brush brands in my next post.  

For more about painting check out my main Tips and Techniques page.