Brush Strokes

Somewhere (perhaps in these pages in this magazine) I devoted an article to understanding your paintbrushes. I made a suggestion that there were three “fundamental” processes that affected the marks made by almost all paintbrushes.

They were:

There comes a point when you have so much paint on your brush, you completely negate the effect that the shape of the brush will have. It may be fine for painting very loose, thick, impasto, impressionistic pieces, but leaves a little less room for finesse

• The amount of pressure applied
• The amount of paint it is holding
• The amount of medium added to the paint

I broke it down into those three groups because I wanted to simplify things, and that's a great place to start. For some more information on this topic, check out our webpage on paintbrushes here: http://www.explore-acrylic-painting.com/paintbrushes.html.

We will still use the above processes because it is impossible to use a paintbrush without using them, and, we will briefly investigate the