Solid intro, especially for beginners. One of my favorite uses for fan brushes is for splatters, if you want a nice, evenly distributed splatter for snow or stars or what have you. One can just load it with some fluid/thinned/diluted paint (this works in acrylics, oils, watercolors, etc.) & then take another brush, or a pen, or something else oblong & rigid, hold them crossed ~5-12 inches above the surface, & gently tap the handle of the fan brush downwards against the other object, lightly, like shaking puffs of confectioner’s sugar out of one of those meshed containers. It can take some practice to mask the areas you don’t want splattered, & to get used to the size & shape of a given brush’s pattern at a given height & tap intensity, but I’m very satisfied with the effect. Also, for the kind of effect I’m thinking of, I’d say you generally want the paint about as fluid as you can get it without losing opacity. You don’t want to dilute a heavy bodied paint so much with water that all you get are faint, transparent marks (unless that’s what you’re going for- but that can also lead to adhesion problems as the binder gets broken up in too much water), so with acrylics, paints that come already in a very fluid form, with less binder & a high pigment load, such as fluid acrylics, high flow acrylics, acrylic inks, which don’t need much or any water added are ideal. But in general, I’d say if you can get close to the consistency of watercolor or gouache that’s been diluted to the “whole milk” or maybe a light “cream” consistency, that’s pretty ideal, unless it’s opaque/pigmented enough [as with high flow or fluid acrylics, or acrylic/other inks] that you can go closer to a watery “tea” consistency while retaining the saturation & opacity you’re looking for. Obviously, what kind of ground/surface you’re painting on also affects what kind of consistency will have what kind of results when dry. If it’s very absorbent (like a “light molding paste” or an absorbent ground, or heavy watercolor paper, then you can probably go for a more watery consistency, because the drops will absorb smoothly in place. Gesso with a tiny bit of light molding paste mixed in is a really nice middle ground & very effective for texturing the surface of a canvas in fine detail, close to the surface (it remains considerably more absorbent than gesso on its own, but it isn’t going to suck it all up if you splatter puddles onto it). If you use watery paint on a less absorptive surface, like a hard/heavy molding paste, hard gesso, or something you’ve already painted with an acrylic gloss or glazing medium, then the drops are just going to sit on the surface until they evaporate, & that can leave weird ring-like residual forms instead of solid, even droplet marks, so maybe someone could have a use for that, but it’s not going to be the same kind of snow/star effect. There’s also the opacity of the pigment & how well it will stand out against the background color to consider, but I’m sure people can figure out the rest with a few minutes of experimentation. In oils I assume you’d need to use a significant amount of a relatively fluid medium like walnut oil to get fluid enough paint for fine splatters on later layers, & it still will be more globby than water-diluted acrylic or watercolor paints (so a more rigid-bristled brush would probably work better & if you really need to atomize the paint even more than tapping will accomplish, a bristle flicking technique might work better. You could probably do the tapping technique with paint diluted with turpentine, but I don’t know how much point there is in doing effects like that in the underpainting that will probably inevitably get covered up by subsequent layers, unless you’re leaving negative space where the splatters were. But using volatile solvents instead of water I think you’d get more of a weird residual evaporation pattern in that case too, instead of clean splatters. Not sure.
nice video, thankyou. May i ask what do u think is a good brush for painting on outlines of shapes initially on top of a ground. I want to do a landscape painting and want to paint in the outlines of fields, farm trees etc ljust ike a drawing first,,, but in paint.
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Solid intro, especially for beginners.
One of my favorite uses for fan brushes is for splatters, if you want a nice, evenly distributed splatter for snow or stars or what have you. One can just load it with some fluid/thinned/diluted paint (this works in acrylics, oils, watercolors, etc.) & then take another brush, or a pen, or something else oblong & rigid, hold them crossed ~5-12 inches above the surface, & gently tap the handle of the fan brush downwards against the other object, lightly, like shaking puffs of confectioner’s sugar out of one of those meshed containers. It can take some practice to mask the areas you don’t want splattered, & to get used to the size & shape of a given brush’s pattern at a given height & tap intensity, but I’m very satisfied with the effect. Also, for the kind of effect I’m thinking of, I’d say you generally want the paint about as fluid as you can get it without losing opacity. You don’t want to dilute a heavy bodied paint so much with water that all you get are faint, transparent marks (unless that’s what you’re going for- but that can also lead to adhesion problems as the binder gets broken up in too much water), so with acrylics, paints that come already in a very fluid form, with less binder & a high pigment load, such as fluid acrylics, high flow acrylics, acrylic inks, which don’t need much or any water added are ideal. But in general, I’d say if you can get close to the consistency of watercolor or gouache that’s been diluted to the “whole milk” or maybe a light “cream” consistency, that’s pretty ideal, unless it’s opaque/pigmented enough [as with high flow or fluid acrylics, or acrylic/other inks] that you can go closer to a watery “tea” consistency while retaining the saturation & opacity you’re looking for. Obviously, what kind of ground/surface you’re painting on also affects what kind of consistency will have what kind of results when dry. If it’s very absorbent (like a “light molding paste” or an absorbent ground, or heavy watercolor paper, then you can probably go for a more watery consistency, because the drops will absorb smoothly in place. Gesso with a tiny bit of light molding paste mixed in is a really nice middle ground & very effective for texturing the surface of a canvas in fine detail, close to the surface (it remains considerably more absorbent than gesso on its own, but it isn’t going to suck it all up if you splatter puddles onto it). If you use watery paint on a less absorptive surface, like a hard/heavy molding paste, hard gesso, or something you’ve already painted with an acrylic gloss or glazing medium, then the drops are just going to sit on the surface until they evaporate, & that can leave weird ring-like residual forms instead of solid, even droplet marks, so maybe someone could have a use for that, but it’s not going to be the same kind of snow/star effect.
There’s also the opacity of the pigment & how well it will stand out against the background color to consider, but I’m sure people can figure out the rest with a few minutes of experimentation.
In oils I assume you’d need to use a significant amount of a relatively fluid medium like walnut oil to get fluid enough paint for fine splatters on later layers, & it still will be more globby than water-diluted acrylic or watercolor paints (so a more rigid-bristled brush would probably work better & if you really need to atomize the paint even more than tapping will accomplish, a bristle flicking technique might work better. You could probably do the tapping technique with paint diluted with turpentine, but I don’t know how much point there is in doing effects like that in the underpainting that will probably inevitably get covered up by subsequent layers, unless you’re leaving negative space where the splatters were. But using volatile solvents instead of water I think you’d get more of a weird residual evaporation pattern in that case too, instead of clean splatters. Not sure.
nice video, thankyou. May i ask what do u think is a good brush for painting on outlines of shapes initially on top of a ground. I want to do a landscape painting and want to paint in the outlines of fields, farm trees etc ljust ike a drawing first,,, but in paint.