Tips For Buying The Right Brushes For Your Oil Portrait Painting

Buying the right brush for your oil portrait painting is one of the most important decisions you can make. Brushes will affect the application of the paint, which is the most important process of your work; therefore you need a brush with durability, one that will hold its shape. Professional quality brushes such as the Da Vinci and Raphael ranges have these qualities and whilst they can be very expensive, their performance and longevity will guarantee you save money in the long run. Economic quality brushes are made cheap, are horrible to use and are not very durable, meaning they will have to continually be replaced.

For any oil portrait painting the best brushes to use are hog hair bristle brushes and the softer haired sable brush. Hog hair bristle brushes have been favoured for many years by professional artists because of their quality and durability, the latter being very important for continued use with solvents and various oil mediums. The Da Vinci range of hog hair brushes are handmade in the traditional manner of collecting each single hair and gathering them into the required shapes, they are also untrimmed leaving the original tips which naturally split into 2 -3 points, enabling each hair to hold more paint. Economic brushes and made mechanically and are trimmed, removing these 'tips'.

Whilst hog hair bristle brushes are known to be stiffer and can leave brush stroke marks (which some artists prefer), the higher quality brushes have a certain softness. The Raphael 'Paris Classics' range is an example of this kind of brush. Held in very high regard, it is made from the finest Chinese bristles, which are known throughout the world as the highest quality available. The brushes supple hairs are ideal for portrait painting, whether it be for grounding work, or for thin glazes and blending. Other highly recommended hog hair brushes are the Da Vinci Series, which like the Raphael range are softer, but still durable and springy.

For blending in oil portrait painting there is no better brush to use than sable. Although susceptible to wearing out, especially on thicker grained canvas, the soft brush is perfect for finer detailed work and for use in subtle blending techniques such as sfumato. These brushes don't come cheap however, but their high price is justified by their extremely high quality. One of the best sable brushes to use is the Russian Kolinsky. The Da Vinci Red Sable range is also a good quality brush and has a little more resilience to wearing than other sables.