Artist’s brushes are tools of the trade. But they’re far more than a stick with some bristles.

If you’re a painter there is a very special connection with your brushes. They are the last link in the chain between your imagination and the surface upon which you will be creating your image.

Craftspeople often have an almost spiritual link with that special chisel, file or tool.

It came home to me recently when one of my favourite watercolour brushes was missing. A No. 9 sable, that I’d bought as a student nearly half a century ago, – gone!  In my student days, it had been a considerable expenditure – but now, though I could easily afford to replace it, I was profoundly saddened.  I had convinced myself it was irreplaceable.

A question formed in my mind – was it the brush that fitted my style of painting, or had I subtley modified my technique to exploit its properties?

Watercolour brushes.

I think that watercolour brushes, more than any other, have special qualities. They are usually made of hair, where brushes for other media may generally be bristle or synthetic.

Squirrel or (ideally) sable hair has a lovely springy quality, and when wet, forms an ideal shape.

When I was teaching watercolour technique, it used to make me smile to see students with incredibly fine brushes with hardly any hair, which they believed were necessary for fine work.  The truth is that even quite a large brush of good quality, when properly wet will form itself into a beautifully fine point.

Watercolour painting is as much (if not more) about painting with water as with paint. So the ability to hold water is a key feature of these tools. Most water colourists have a selection of brushes including a large ‘mop’ or two. These are wonderful for soaking backgrounds and creating exciting ‘wet in wet’ effects – with more than a little serendipity.

Care of water colour brushes

I don’t need to say much here, as there’s a huge number of articles and posts on-line covering the topic. But do look after these brushes. They are very easy to clean and take care of. Even dried in watercolour will wash out with careful attention – so no excuses.

Don’t ignore the shape of the brush, and do allow it to dry naturally – please don’t leave it stood in a water pot to take on an uncomfortable curve

Do keep your watercolour brushes solely for watercolour. They can be used for oil painting if necessary and very carefully cleaned with solvent immediately after use – but as we know, oil and water don’t mix. So keep your brushes separate if you can.

For me, the big no-no is using watercolour brushes for acrylics. Yes, they are both water based media, but where watercolour washes out even when dry, once acrylic has set it turns to plastic. And it’s really difficult to wash out completely even while still wet.

Brushes for oils and acrylics

As I noted earlier, these tend to be bristle. Various man-made materials are also used and are particularly good for acrylic painting. There is something about the springiness of bristle which is very satisfying in use – especially on stretched canvas.

They can hold thick pigment – and in oil and acrylic painting you most often paint light upon dark – opposite to watercolour. So you tend to have more pigment on the brush. I find these brushes encourage me to be more vigorous and spontaneous.

Bristle and synthetic brushes tend to be quite tough. So even though they urge you to work them hard, they should last long enough to become special favourites. As they are relatively inexpensive compared to sable brushes, you can keep separate sets for oils and acrylics – I tend to seek out sets of different coloured brushes to avoid any disasterous mis-selections.

More brush care

Again, there’s plenty of advice about brush-care. My personal regime is to wash brushes used for acrylics immediately, in warm water, and massage neat washing-up liquid into them while doing so. Then rince out until clean.

Oil paint is very slow drying, so is easy to clean at the end of a painting session. Use your favourite solvent and work it deep into the bristles. Once all the paint is out,  wrapping the bristles loosely in newspaper or kitchen towel will help them keep their shape.

It’s worth the trouble to look after them – and they will soon become faithful companions and the conduits for your creativity.

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I was asked if I could provide some drawing tips. Not a difficult request you might say, but it made me think carefully. I’d need to start by asking a few questions.

It depends what you want to get out of your drawing, why are you doing it in the first place and what are your stumbling blocks?

Accuracy and representation

For some people, the goal is accurate representation of what’s before them. Whether it’s a landscape, a model or a still life. These artists are looking for analytical tips and tricks to transfer a version of the 3-D scene they are viewing, onto a two dimensional sheet of paper. Of course there are many approaches and devices that will help them achieve this goal. But figurative accuracy is not the only objective of drawing, and so such tips may be of little help to other artists.

I remember an early life drawing class when the tutor watched me working and commented – ‘Ah, you’re sticking very close to the model, I see.’

This surprised me as I thought this was the only way to draw. Wasn’t this the purpose of the exercise? But I soon learned that for many, the subject before them is just a starting point for wider exploration. These people all look for different tips and guidance to get the best from their exercises.

Speedy distillation

For some, drawing can be an activity involved in extracting the key essence from a subject as quickly as possible. In other words working to use as few lines or strokes necessary to capture the moment.

A common exercise in figure drawing is to begin with a one minute pose, then speed up to a 30 second pose, then 10 seconds, then 5.

Often artists draw to understand specific things that are happening before them. Studying movement or passages of light. This can be developing skills to record fast moving subjects or create expressions of movement in a static canvas. Take a look a Duchamp’s famous ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’. You can imagine the series of drawings that helped prepare for this.

Exploring hidden depths

Architectural or landscape artists however, may want to explore perspective effects. How to create impressions of depth on a flat surface.

You will often see the work of renaissance artists with straight lines drawn converging on distant vanishing points as they build illusion into the structure of their drawings. Exploration can be as important an objective as creation.

Things may not be as they seem

Often we want to clarify what occurs in the real world in comparison to our imagined world – what does a tree actually look like? How is a wave formed? How long is an arm? What does a conker look like?

From figurative to abstract.

Many artists’ ultimate goal may be to create abstract or non-figurative paintings as an end product, but extract subject ideas from a real situation.  A real-life landscape can provide a starting point to construct an abstract painting. The starting point will almost always be drawing but with very specific approaches.

Take a look at some of the work of the St Ives school from the 1950s. Some amazing abstract paintings, but unmistakebly products of the Cornish landsacape. Drawing upon the surroundings.

A work in itself

Yet one more reason some people choose to draw is to create drawing as an end in itself. For them a drawing is a finished artwork and they will be seeking very different guidance from those whose drawings are preparatory.

So, when asked for drawing tips, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Everyone has their own objectives and their own issues. However, I think there is one common, connecting theme – that’s observation and expression. And observation is something I will be dealing with in another post – however, what you observe and how you express it is very personal and what goes to make your work unique.

Should I work from photographs? Many artists do, but I usually advise caution and try to avoid solely copying photographic images.

I have a number of reasons, but the main one is ‘selection’.

As an artist working from life – landscape, figure, still-life, whatever – you make selections. You decide what’s important and what you want to focus upon. The way you work aims to draw the viewer’s attention to something specific.

Sometimes these are conscious decisions, but more often than not they are subconscious or intuitive. The artist ‘sees’ something that sparks the imagination, then intuition takes over in the handling of the materials.

One of the key skills for an artist to develop is selectivity.

With a photograph, the photographer has made the selection. Maybe not what the artist might have chosen, bcause photographers have different objectives.

The way we look at a scene is not the same way a camera does. Our eyes are constantly moving – being attracted to something of interest or rejecting other areas. We build up an impression based upon many stimuli as we view a scene, a room or a person – in fact our whole world.

The camera is fixed and records all that is in front of it with equal clarity (let’s ignore depth of field for now!).

Capture the moment and more

As a tool of record, the camera is king and that’s why many artists choose it. It’s a backup for our flakey memory and allows us to reconstruct an experience many years after. And there lies a key. Art is more concerned with expressing an experience, and a glance at a snapshot can revive that experience, with all its emotional context.

Where I suggest the photography needs to be used with care is when it simply supplies a subject to be copied. I have seen aspiring artists take an image and begin copying from one corner all the way down to the opposite corner.

If the artist is working to develop their analytic skills this may be a worthwhile exercise. But it should be a conscious decision.

Photography and painting mix well

There is another approach where some really creative artists combine painting and photography to produce amazing works.

Perhaps an outstanding example is David Hockney who has long worked with the camera and is renowned for his amazing photographic collages. I strongly recommend checking them out.

There are many others  creating great works, blurring the borders between paint and camera including:

• Flóra Borsi
• Chad Wys
• Joshua Citarella

Such artists are really worth exploring as they are not working from photographs, but with photography.

There’s a common misconception that oil painting is difficult. Students at my evening classes almost always started their explorations of painting with watercolour. They believed that was easier and oils were just for more experienced painters.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Watercolour is wonderful and challenging but perhaps one of the most difficult media to master, and let me explain why.

Firstly, watercolour is transparent, so you have to work from light up to dark. Usually that means building up in glazes, but whatever has gone before is visible. The beautiful translucent effects are achieved by light passing through the paint layers and being reflected back from the white paper. So too many layers kill the luminosity.

Oh, and while we’re talking about ‘white’, that’s generally achieved in watercolour by leaving areas of the paper unpainted. This can require careful planning and skilled brushwork.

Watercolour dries very quickly. For some, that’s a benefit, but though it rewards fast workers, its rather unforgiving of errors. Mistakes and changes are difficult to correct. You can’t paint over a layer except with a much darker layer.

The right paper is also important. It needs to be very absorbent so that layers sink in to different depths as they are laid one on top of another. Paper designed for printing is coated so that the inks sit on the top and is inappropriate for watercolour.

Oil on troubled water colour

Oil paints are totally different – well that’s not strictly true. All artists media are basically the same pigments, mixed with some kind of binder or medium. Some artists like to buy the pigment raw and mix with their medium of choice.

So, if you buy, say, some Raw Umber and mix it with gum arabic, you have a watercolour; mix it with oil (perhaps linseed or poppy seed) and you have oil paint. You can also mix it with egg to produce tempera, acrylic medium, – add a little chalk to make gouache.

Make it easy

But let’s get back to oil paint – why do I say it’s far easier to use than watercolour?

Firstly, it’s generally slow to dry. It can take hours or often days to dry completely. That means you can go back and work on for some time and still achieve subtle blends.

It was the Dutch who developed oil painting, primarily Jan Van Eyck in the 15th century. He was answering the problem of struggling with water-based paints which dried far too quickly when painting on large works.

Oils allow you to work at a more more leisurely pace and go back again and again and again.

If there’s an area you’re unhappy with, you have plenty of time to wipe away the paint with a rag and turps, or just scrape it off with a pallet-knife and paint it again.

The paint on your pallet may remain usable for quite some time too. Perhaps revive it with a little linseed oil or turpentine and it may save the need for mixing that subtle shade from scratch again.

Jack Sprat

You actually have a lot of control over the drying time. Artists talk about ‘fat’ and ‘lean’. If you add a lot of oil to your paint (fat), it dries very slowly, where if you use turpentine instead (lean), it dries much more quickly.

So, it’s common for artists to sketch out the subject or structure of their painting with washes of very thin, ‘lean’ paint. They can then work on this building up the picture – painting fat over lean.

Opacity v transparency

The second important advantage of oil paint is that it’s a very opaque medium. Where watercolor technique is generally to paint from light up to dark, with oil paint the reverse can be true. Dark areas are usually blocked in first, then opaque lighter coloured painting applied on top. No need to worry about leaving white spaces. Just let the paint dry enough, then paint light or white, on top.

Not either/or

But let me be clear. I’m not damning or dismissing watercolour – in fact it’s one of my favourite media – I love it, as you may gather from some of the paintings dotted around this site.

What I hope I’ve done is to remove some of the mystique of oil painting, and explained why there’s no need to fear it as it’s a very easy and forgiving method. And for a mistake prone artist like me, quite a blessing.

So pick up those brushes and make a start.