Oil Painting Brushes

Hi, I'm Katie Liddiard. With so many options for your oil painting brushes, how do you know what to use for your specific project? I'll tell you what I use, and maybe you can figure out through my experience what will work for your project. I tend to go for synthetic brushes, and that's what these are, most of these are. But there's also other options for natural hog hair, which is this. You can see the roughness of that brush. There's also natural hair brushes, which are soft like this one. You can see just how soft and beautiful that brush head is. The appeal of the more rough hog hair brushes is that you can apply a lot of paint, but the softer brushes are really great for blending beautifully. So I find that the synthetics, which is just basically a combination of the stiffness of the hog hair with the softness of the natural hair, is exactly what I need for my projects. So the different shapes of brushes will give you different strokes. Our filbert head here, as you can see, is rounded corners, which will give you a really soft stroke that's really great for blending, and I use it kind of for all over, all-around picture making. But the flat head is really great for those strong, bold strokes that some people really enjoy in their work. You can see just how squared off the corners are compared to that filbert. You can build up some really beautiful paintings with that brush, but it tends to be a little bit too harsh for my needs. So I like the softness that the filbert brings. Then there's the fan brush, which I don't personally use in my paintings, but some people really like 'em to soften out their strokes. The other brush heads that we have, we have what's called an egbert, which is elongated. It's basically an elongated filbert there. Some people really like the strokes that you can get, the really long strokes that you can get. I find them a little clumsy, personally, but they can be really great for loading up long strokes and getting those really beautiful lines that way. And then the last brush that we have, brush shape, is the round. You can see that it's pretty fat all the way around, comes to a point, and it's really great for either broad strokes, or we can have smaller, pointed strokes with it. I will usually use smaller rounds for more detailing at the end, but some people like to use this as their all-around, go-to brush. So again, my go-to is this trusted filbert brush. I love it. It really gets me 99% of my way through the painting. And then the other ones are just for that little sparkle there at the end. So hopefully this was helpful to you to figure out what you need in your painting, what brushes you might be interested in trying out, and again, experiment, figure out what works best for you.