What type of paintbrushes do I need for silk painting?

What type of paintbrushes do I need for silk painting, Teena?

Transcript for “What type of paintbrushes do I need for silk painting?”:

Would you like some tips on looking after your paintbrushes for silk painting? Hi, I’m Teena Hughes from http://How-to-paint-on-Silk.com and today I’m going to have a little bit of a chat with you about looking after your brushes, what the different types are for, and how to wash them afterwards. Okay. Ready? Let’s go.

Today I’d like to talk to you about paintbrushes and there are so many different sizes, different colors, different types of hair or acrylic brush for them. Some of them are hard, some of them are soft, so we’ve got lots to look at. I’ll take them out of this jar so that you can have a better look. Oops, that one’s gone off the edge. Okay, so here we have two brushes and I have more, but these are just two to show you today. These have much sturdier ends on them. These are definitely acrylic. Yoi can see them here.

What I use these for is when I want to add designs to my silk by using cold wax or a watered-down outliner, so that I can create a wild crazy designs and then let them dry on the silk and then paint them afterwards. So with the cold wax, this is perfect for me. This one is for much finer details and I can get smaller lines with this and having them hard means that it’s going to work better with products like cold wax, which is suitable for silk painting, but not cold wax that’s used in other types of craft. Now with the soft brushes I have lots and lots of sizes and it just depends on what you need to do. So this would be the sizes that I normally use and a little bit bigger than that even. This one I would use for a much bigger surface.

And here’s one I prepared earlier. I was washing the brushes and this one was so old all of the hair fell out (laughter) so it’s clean. It’s absolutely clean. It just has no hair anymore. So it’s like a headless brush. So I wanted to share that with you.

These little tiny ones – I use these for when I want to get into little corners of the silk and fixed designs. I want to perhaps paint a shadow around something that I’ve created on the silk. And I love these little pointy ones you can do so much with these too – go back and embellish your silk while it’s still wet or even when it’s dry afterwards. Here I have another harder one. It’s not quite as hard as the others, but still I get to use these for all different things when I’m painting, depending on what I’m trying to create.

So I guess what I’m trying to get across to you is have lots of brushes. Don’t be afraid to buy more brushes than just two or three – buy lots of them. Try them out. And the beauty of silk painting is that you can try lots of different ways of creating beautiful designs on silk – all you have to do is have a play, have a go, have a practice, and then you work out what works best for you.

Something I forgot to mention is washing the brushes, so just a brief overview. What I like to do is grab an old glass or a jar of some description, anything that will hold some water. I like to put a little bit of warm water in, a couple of drops of dish washing liquid. Put the brushes in, swish them around, but whatever you do, don’t press so hard that you break the hairs or the bristles no matter what they are made of, so just be gentle with your brushes.

Then I do that a bit. Empty out the water, run the brushes under clear water, and then just keep massaging them if you like, to get the color out because these metal sections hold lots of die. So when you’re painting, be aware of that. Try not to put your brush in too deep into the dye. You don’t want the dye to spread all the way up here because that makes it harder to clean, and then you may think your brush is clean – until the next time you go to paint. You dip that paintbrush into some dye and lo and behold, out comes a different color because there was still dye up here.

So just a little bit of advice there and make sure that after you’ve washed your brushes, cleaned out the jar, put the brushes back in, and then stand it up in your workspace. Let the brushes dry and you’re ready to go for the next silk painting adventure.

That’s it for my quick tip for today. I look forward to hearing from you. If you have any questions, please do remember to put your questions here on Youtube down below this video, and don’t forget to pop over to my website. There’s also a link down below where you can go and grab the PDF that I’ve created about paintbrushes for silk painting

Cheerio for now. This is Teena Hughes from http://How-to-paint-on-Silk.com

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Ciao ciao for now. Bye Bye.

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