Introduction
Your paintbrushes are probably the most important miniture painting tool you own. Taking time to select the correct brush and to maintain your brushes will have a major effect on the quality of your painting. A good quality brush with a fine tip will give you better control over where you apply the paint and allow you to paint the finner details of a model.
At this point we should also take a quick look at the construction of a paint brush as later sections will refer to certain sections of the brush.
There are three main sections to a paint brush.
- The Tip: The bit you paint with.
- The Ferrule: The metal section, which holds the whole thing together.
- The Handle: The bit you hold, usually made from wood.
Brush Types
These days there are two different types of brush. Natual Hair and synthetic nylon brushes, no matter which you chose make sure it is the best brush available that you can afford and spend some time picking the brush.
Synthetic nylon brushes are made from either nylon of polyester fibre. They tend to have a stiffer feel to natural hair brushes and do not wear out so easily. They also tend to cural at the tip as they age resulting in a rather anoying hook shape at the end of your brush.
Natural Hair brushes can be made from a number of hair fibres. Sable brushes are generally regarded as the best hair fibre to use for miniature painting as they hold a good point. Red sable obtained from weasles is considered to be a good grade but if you want to go all out Kolinsky Sable is the most expensive and highly regarded natural hair from the tails of weasels found in Northeast Asia.
Brush Care
There's really only one rule to follow here.
Never get paint on the ferrule. Doing so can cause the brush hairs to spray out when the paint dries makeing it useless, immediatly clean the brush if you see this happening.
Brush cleaning
You can get acrylic paint brush cleaners from most art stores these days. At the end of every painting session take the time to clean your brushes in one of these cleaners following the instructions on the bottle. You can then take this a step further and use brush soap to reshape the point keeping an eye out for any stray hairs.
Use the brush cap to protect the point and stand it upright in a pot or what ever you use to hold your brushes.
What I Use
Winsor and Newton's Series 7 Kolinsky Sable brushes.
Very nice brushes, a size 000 will set you about £7 to £8 and progress up to about £30 for a size 7. So there not cheap, but I think they are deffently worth it if you want to take your painting to the next level.
