Marion Boddy-Evans is an artist living on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. She has written for art magazines blogs, edited how-to art titles, and co-authored travel books.
Using a fan brush for artistic purposes
Use KINGART® Original Gold Specialty® 9246 Series Synthetic Bristle Rake/Comb Fan brushes to create special effects such as fur, hair, grasses, foliage, and more. These brushes have a fan shape with staggered length filaments making the tip of the brush more of a comb. The brush head has a naturally fingered shape for creating texture and depth with layers of color.
KINGART® white synthetic bristle brushes are a better multi-purpose brush with interlocked fibers that offer fantastic resilience and control. These brushes hold and absorb more paint and stand up to heavy body acrylics, and water-soluble oils.
About Original Gold®
Original Gold® from KINGART®, offers a complete collection of multi-media painting brushes to help artists create the perfect masterpiece. The expert brush makers at KINGART® developed the best quality paintbrush for oil, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache painting. These brushes lend themselves beautifully to fine detailing, blocking, shading, lettering, applying washes and more. Each brush style is designed with its own special blend of luxury synthetic filaments for greater versatility, enhanced color-holding capacity, and precise color placement.
This brush was designed with versatility as its main feature with exceptional snap, superior absorption, and fluid retention. It’s excellent for use both with watercolor, oil, and acrylic, allowing artists to create fine details as well as providing superior performance for coloring large areas and backgrounds.
KINGART™ Original Gold series synthetic brushes are made from the finest-quality Golden Taklon filaments to create brush heads that are remarkably durable, easy to care for and versatile, they work equally well with watercolor, acrylic, and oil paint. Each brush is expertly crafted to mimic the virtues of sable hair, including exceptional paint-holding capacity.
Thanks to the perfect combination of three different diameters and three lengths in the fibers, the brushstroke’s result is the same as one made of natural hair. Each brush holds its shape well and consists of filaments that are dyed and baked to increase softness and absorption. You will be amazed at how well they hold their shape.
The filaments of each brush are bound together with nickel-plated brass ferrules and crimped at the bottom to ensure an extra-secure bond to the handle. Each handle is ergonomically crafted to reduce muscle fatigue and are carefully balanced to provide maximum control. Original Gold® artist brushes from KINGART® feature a metallic gold ring and gloss black handle with silver crimped nickel-plated ferrules.
KINGART® Original Gold® offers a wide range of affordable, durable, and vegan-friendly essential, specialty and miniature brushes. Whether you’re a seasoned professional, or just learning to paint, you can’t go wrong with these exceptional premium artist paint brushes.
KINGART™ brushes are designed with the artist in mind and are manufactured to survive years of steady use. A KINGART® PREMIUM brush makes all the difference in the world!
Additional Details:
- Available in two (2) sizes – 2 & 4
- Exclusive artisanal process, using the best materials, and the finishing of the expert hands of three generations of brush makers
- KINGART® premium artist brushes are always handcrafted
- Premium quality for mixed media applications
- Finest-quality Golden Taklon filament for best performance
- Three different diameters and three lengths in the fibers allows for great control over paint techniques
- Synthetic filament has been baked for softness and optimal absorption
- Exceptional spring and you will be amazed at how well they hold their shape when cared for properly
- Vegan-Friendly 100% synthetic filament
- Handcrafted products are green. Work done by hand takes less energy than a mass production assembly line, which makes it more environmentally sustainable.
- Collection features a wide variety of shapes and sizes
- Features gloss black handle with gold ring with round seamless silver crimped nickel-plated ferrule
Brush sizes: The length and width of a brush of a given shape and size may vary by manufacturer as brush sizes are not standardized. Since fine art brushes are handmade, expect some variation even among brushes from within a single brush line.
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ABOUT US
KINGART has a rich heritage and has been rooted in the arts and crafts industry since 1963 through Loew-Cornell Inc. For three generations, we’ve been proudly serving the artist, craftsman, ceramist, hobbyist, and decorative painter. In 2018, we launched KINGART®, incorporating the sophistication and experience of a lineage of art suppliers into one powerhouse brand.
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Fan Brush With a Haircut
Because of its distinctive, semi-circular shape, a fan brush can also easily create a series of marks in your painting that are repetitive and predictable, where the technique is too evident in the result. That’s “oh, the artist used a fan brush to do this” result. It’s often also wide for what you’re wanting to paint. The solution is to give it a haircut to alter the shape, as shown in the photo here.
A word of warning: don’t do this to a paintbrush that doesn’t belong to you, and don’t do it to your brand-new, expensive, sable hair fan brush. The former can destroy a friendship and the latter is sacrilegious.
To give a fan brush a haircut, simply take a pair of scissors or a craft knife and cut off some of the hairs on the outer edge. Rather cut less than more; you can always trim off another bit.
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Dry Brushing with a Fan Brush
A fan brush works well for dry brushing, where you want only a little paint on the brush, to apply roughly and loosely. To load a fan brush with paint for dry brushing techniques, take a dry brush and touch the very tips into the paint a few times. Ideally the paint won’t be very fluid, but quite stiff or buttery so it sits at the end of the brush hairs and doesn’t seep up.
Test how much paint you’ve on the brush on your palette or a scrap bit of paper. See bottom left in the photo, where I’m working on a disposable paper palette. Don’t worry that this is going to take all the paint off, it won’t, and with dry brushing you want very little anyway.
It takes a little bit of practice to judge how much paint is on your brush, but if in doubt have less rather than more. You can always apply a bit more paint. But you’ll find a little bit of paint can go further than you might think. In the photo at bottom right, I’ve used the paint that was on the brush in the photo on the bottom left. I’ve painted this on white paper, but imagine it as texture in long grass, a weathered old barn, or windswept hair.
If you’ve only one fan brush and want to change colors, wash out the brush and then press a towel or paper towel around it for a minute or so to absorb as much moisture from the hairs as possible. It should then be dry enough to continue dry brushing with another color. If the brush is dripping wet, you’ll get quite a different effect.
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Wet-on-Wet Painting with a Fan Brush
Painting wet-on-wet with a fan brush, or with a lot of fluid paint on the brush, gives quite a different mark to dry brushing. It’s a useful technique for painting hair, grass, and fur.
The photo top left shows how even a coarse-hair fan brush will easily pick up a lot of fluid paint. Even more so if you dip both sides of the brush into the paint. The photo top right shows the mark the brush makes when pressed fairly hard onto paper. (Note I’m using a had a cut fan brush, one that’s had a hair cut.)
If you let the tips of the brush glide over the surface, you get a more delicate result — see the different mark making in the photo bottom left. Use the brush in long strokes, swerving from side to side a bit, and you’ve started to paint wavy hair.
In your painting sketchbook, experiment with:
- How much paint you have on the brush
- How dry or wet the paint and brush is
- How hard you press down with the brush
- And with various lengths of strokes, from very short to very long.
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- The fan-shaped brush is perfect for blending oil paints. I use it to either blur fresh paint (be it an area or a detail) into the background, or to create a smooth gradient between paints.
When painting with very fatty paints, or simply a lot of paint, this brush will lose its efficiency, as it is too thin and fine to manipulate, accumulate, or contain much paint.
I have no experience using this with acrylic paints, but can imagine it will work similarly, when using little and diluted acrylics.
With this brush it is especially important to clean it regularly, as it loses this functionality whenever there is the slightest irregularity (leaving obvious marks in the paint surface). - With the comb, rake, or fingered brush I have a slightly similar experience: it can be used to blend areas or details while maintaining a certain amount texture (resulting in a ‘broken’ gradient, if you will).
It’s also an obvious contender for painting details like vegetation (grass, reeds, branches, &c.) and hairs, as it naturally leaves lines.
It can also be used for graining or painting imitation wood (although those brushes are usually larger).
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answered May 21, 2021 at 16:13
Joachim ♦ Joachim
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It did look like the one I made for some fake wood grain (a load of brushes clamped between 2 boards) but I thought that was coincidence
May 23, 2021 at 16:29
The fan brush is also very useful to paint lots of fine texture.
Bob Ross often used a fan brush to paint bushes or foliage on trees and waterfalls. You can use the same technique to paint either a rough texture of numerous tiny dots (like distant grass, leaves, rock, sea foam) or a smooth texture of fine, parallel lines (like hair, fur, water, grass and others).
For the technique to work the bristles must be hard enough to hold their fan shape even when they’re wet with paint and water. If the bristles clump together once they’re wet, you get a much bigger texture that resembles that of the comb brush.
The comb brush achieves similar effects (several parallel lines with a single stroke), but not as fine as the fan brush. It’s useful for grass, fur, hair or woodgrain textures that are in the foreground of the painting and therefore more detailed.
