bristle brushes

I’ve bought some art stuff lately, so I thought I’d post some mini-reviews, of which this is the first. Here is some stuff from Nat­ural Pig­ments. Alas, I get no kick­backs if you buy this stuff. I also bought some lead white primer, but I haven’t used it yet so you’ll just have to wait.

Bad­ger brush set

Bad­ger hair is tra­di­tional for mak­ing brushes used for blend­ing oil paint, so I broke down and bought this set from Nat­ural Pig­ments. There is a fan, a round, and two sizes of flats. So far, I’ve just tried the round, but for blend­ing it is just lovely. I had been doing most blend­ing with a syn­thetic round, and wow! The bad­ger beats that by a mile. Highly rec­om­mended if you paint in a style that involves ren­der­ing. I wish I’d bought these a long time ago.

#2 Bris­tle flat brushes

These were cheap, so I bought a few. The han­dles are nicely laque­red in a nat­ural wood color. The fer­ules are firmly set and dou­ble crimped. The brush hairs are well set (flags fac­ing inward), with the annoy­ance of a few stray hairs that needed trim­ming. The brushes hold their shape under heavy use and have the right level of resis­tance when mov­ing paint. These are an excel­lent value for inex­pen­sive brushes.

Velazquez medium

This is cal­cite ground with a blend of bod­ied and refined lin­seed oils. I’ve made basi­cally the same stuff myself, but it’s con­ve­nient to have some already made up in a jar. It’s light gray and the con­sis­tency of oil paint. Mixed with paint it adds no color, but makes it more trans­par­ent. This is a good medium for velat­uras and for mak­ing strongly tint­ing pig­ments less strong with­out los­ing body. I haven’t noticed that it has much effect on the brush­ing prop­er­ties of the paint. They have a sim­i­lar medium that’s specif­i­cally for impasto, but that’s not how I paint. This stuff won’t mag­i­cally let you paint like Velazquez, but it is use­ful and inexpensive.