Testing Your Brushes: The Ones That Lie to You
Okay, so before we get further into wet-on-dry, I want to stop and talk about brushes, because I think this gets skipped and it shouldn't.
Here's my opinion, and I know it goes against what most beginner materials tell you. Everyone says buy good paper first, cheap brushes are fine when you're starting out. I think that's backwards, at least once you're past the very first weeks. Cheap paper is honestly fine to learn on. It buckles a little, it doesn't lift as clean, but you can still see what you did. A cheap brush, though, will straight up lie to you. It'll make a bad stroke look like a technique problem when it's actually just a bad tool. You'll blame yourself for something that was never your fault.
What a lying brush actually does
A cheap brush usually fails in one of two ways.
Either it won't hold a point, so every line you try to pull thin comes out fuzzy and wide no matter how careful you are. Or it doesn't hold water right, it either dumps everything in the first half-inch of a stroke or it runs dry too fast and you're fighting it the whole way across the paper.
Both of those feel, from the inside, like your hand is the problem. It's not. It's the brush.
The test
Here's what I want you to actually do at home, it takes five minutes.
Fill a glass with water. Dip your brush, load it up.
Pull a single long stroke across a scrap piece of paper, top to bottom, in one motion. Don't stop, don't correct, just pull it.
Watch three things.
First, does the brush come to a point on its own when it's wet, or do you have to sort of coax it there. A good round brush snaps back to a point almost immediately after you load it. If yours stays splayed out like a little broom, that's your brush, not your hand.
Second, does the stroke stay even in width the whole way down, or does it start fat and go thin and scratchy before you're even halfway. That's the water-holding problem. A decent brush gives you most of the length of the stroke before it starts running dry.
Third, when you lift the brush at the end of the stroke, does it leave a clean tail or a ragged one. Ragged tail, again, brush problem.
Do this same test with every brush you own. You'll find out fast which ones are lying to you.
An old failure that's actually about this
The first real painting I ever did was the wall of a slot canyon, the morning after I'd rappelled it with David and Brady. I got the rock right. I mean genuinely right, the color, the layered look of it. And then I got to the sky and just flooded it. Way too much water, no control, it ran down into the rock like a tide line coming in.
For a long time I told myself that was a water-control problem. Me being new, me being sloppy, needing more practice with wet-on-wet. And some of that's true. But part of it, and I didn't figure this out for a while, was that I was using a brush that held way more water than I thought it did and released it unevenly. I kept dipping the way you'd dip a normal brush and getting a flood every time because the thing was basically a sponge with a handle. I fought myself for months blaming my hand for what was actually the brush.
I still kept that painting, taped it to my fridge for a year, because the rock part was good enough to earn it a spot. But I think about that flooded sky a lot when I'm testing a brush now.
What to actually buy
You don't need six brushes. You need two or three that you trust.
A round brush, somewhere in the size 8 to 12 range, is your workhorse. That's what you'll use for most of a landscape. A smaller round, maybe a 4 or 6, for detail work. And if you want a flat brush for skies and big washes, get one, but it's not required.
Buy the best round brush you can afford before you buy more paper. That's the actual advice. A synthetic-blend round in that mid-size range from any decent art supply place will outperform a cheap set of ten brushes that come bundled with your starter kit. I know the bundled kit feels like a deal. It's the worst deal in this whole hobby.
One real caution here: natural hair brushes, the nice ones, don't like being left standing in a water jar with the bristles bent against the glass. Dries them out weird, ruins the point permanently. Lay them flat to dry instead. Cheap synthetic brushes don't care as much, which is honestly the only thing they've got going for them.
Before next time
Do the stroke test on every brush you own and set aside the ones that failed. Bring your best one or two to our next session, we're going to start layering with them.