Reply To: Miniature paint brushes – What do you recommend?

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Maybe once a year, Jackson Arts will have a brush sale. Subscribe to their newsletter.

I have a variety of junky natural and synthetic brushes and I use  them *a lot*. You can use them for brush-on priming, washes, and often base coats (including when you need multiple coats). Only when I’m fine-tuning, highlighting, or have a tiny area to paint (eg. eyes, sometimes faces) do I use a hobby brush. I’m certainly not going to use a hobby brush for drybrushing, metallics, gap-filling, etc. Amazon has cheap synthetics that will keep their point a few times, enough for metallics.

Don’t forget empty eyedroppers, to hold hair conditioner to clean the brush, as well as your thinner of choice. Two rinse cups and a DIY wet palette, and a strong light are your cheapest improvements to your painting. I find dipping the brush in hair conditioner lazier to use (and therefore more effective for me 😛 than brush soap.

If you’re new to hobby brushes, you’re new to painting. Buy a set of cheap natural brushes and learn to take care of them. You aren’t skilled yet, so those expensive hobby brushes won’t help you as much as they do an experienced painter. You’re also going to experiment with a variety of brush points, anyway, so you’ll want a few different brush sizes to play with before knowing what works best for you. You don’t know how to clean brushes, so better to destroy a cheap brush than an expensive one.  I’ve destroyed maybe a little less than a hundred dollars worth of brushes (and that’s not very many brushes) because I didn’t have enough experience taking care of them. In the end, you’ll use them as your junk brushes, anyway, so it’s not like you won’t still find them useful.