I completely agree with your advice! Thank you for making this simple and helpful guide for beginners! My favorites are taklon pointed round and bright (flat & short). Those two shapes are so versatile and useful! I see so many artists speaking poorly of using very small brushes for fine detail but as a beginner I found it very useful and relaxing to have 5mm wide flat brushes to make clean lines with or to fill in color with. I mostly do landscapes and so I also feel that if someone were to request a third most-useful shape that it would be a mop or fan brush, as they are wonderful for blending or foliage respectively. A tip for absolute beginners not mentioned is to not trust a famous paint manufacturer's brushes just because they make good paint. When I started I got a set of W&N "foundation" series natural bristle brushes and they were absolutely horrible even when brand new. The bristles were very coarse and uneven, misshapen, and loosely attached, and the ferrules were loose, bent, and ill-fitting which made controlling my marks difficult. After only a few paintings many pieces of bristle broke off and got stuck in the paint deposited on the canvas despite very gentle use. It was also not very economical with paint because the brushes absorbed a lot of the paint's oil and trapped the pigment in between the hairs, without releasing it onto the canvas. It was even very difficult to clean them in OMS and turpentine. If I had not already known this to be signs of a very poor quality brush I would have let it continue and my learning would have suffered greatly. Thankfully where I live a less-known company called Kingart makes wonderful affordable brushes at extremely high quality, and I was lucky enough to afford a replacement set very quickly. With quality brushes in my hand I was able to advance my skill very quickly and most of my frustrations vanished instantly. Good brushes make painting a joy!
Thank you 🙏🏻 Yes our tools are very important for us in order to create good paintings and enjoy the process. There is definitely a bit of research and trial and error to be made in order to find the best tools that fit our needs.
Thanks for this discussion!
@@jttigera2 you are welcome, my pleasure! Thank you 🙏🏻
I completely agree with your advice! Thank you for making this simple and helpful guide for beginners!
My favorites are taklon pointed round and bright (flat & short). Those two shapes are so versatile and useful! I see so many artists speaking poorly of using very small brushes for fine detail but as a beginner I found it very useful and relaxing to have 5mm wide flat brushes to make clean lines with or to fill in color with. I mostly do landscapes and so I also feel that if someone were to request a third most-useful shape that it would be a mop or fan brush, as they are wonderful for blending or foliage respectively.
A tip for absolute beginners not mentioned is to not trust a famous paint manufacturer's brushes just because they make good paint. When I started I got a set of W&N "foundation" series natural bristle brushes and they were absolutely horrible even when brand new. The bristles were very coarse and uneven, misshapen, and loosely attached, and the ferrules were loose, bent, and ill-fitting which made controlling my marks difficult. After only a few paintings many pieces of bristle broke off and got stuck in the paint deposited on the canvas despite very gentle use. It was also not very economical with paint because the brushes absorbed a lot of the paint's oil and trapped the pigment in between the hairs, without releasing it onto the canvas. It was even very difficult to clean them in OMS and turpentine. If I had not already known this to be signs of a very poor quality brush I would have let it continue and my learning would have suffered greatly. Thankfully where I live a less-known company called Kingart makes wonderful affordable brushes at extremely high quality, and I was lucky enough to afford a replacement set very quickly. With quality brushes in my hand I was able to advance my skill very quickly and most of my frustrations vanished instantly. Good brushes make painting a joy!
Thank you 🙏🏻
Yes our tools are very important for us in order to create good paintings and enjoy the process. There is definitely a bit of research and trial and error to be made in order to find the best tools that fit our needs.