What is the difference between watercolor brushes and acrylic brushes

The anatomy of the sable hair is fascinating. It has a flowing curved shape with a thick belly and a very fine tip.

In a paint brush, the ferrule holds the hairs just below the belly, which allows for maximum elasticity and snap. This belly helps push the hairs apart in the brush, which opens gaps for water to cling to the hairs. The curve of the hair gives sable brushes, furthermore, exceptional ability to be finely shaped. The surface of sable hair is covered in microscopic scales, the so called spinous cuticle scales that are formed like petals and oriented towards the hair tip.

These scales allow sable hair to absorb and hold a lot of water or paint. The difference between hair and bristle is that the ends of bristles split up into a handful of tips, the so-called flag , while hairs have a single tip.

Bristles have a natural curve, which is reduced somewhat by boiling. This curve is taken advantage of by interlocking fibers during assembly, so that the curved bristles oppose one another and curve towards the center.

Domesticated pigs have less bristles and their bristles have less flag. The surface of hog bristles is covered in so-called imbricate scales , which consists of overlapping scales with narrow margins, also commonly found in human hairs.

Cow or ox hair is taken from the ears auricles of the cattle. Ox hair is very long, strong, inexpensive, and has appealing elasticity, which makes it great for rougher brush techniques. Ox hair is often blended with hog bristles or inexpensive sable, to give the ox hair brush heads better pointing capability.

Hair from squirrel tails is called Fehair. It is very fine, soft, absorbent, and not springy, making it suitable for the production of mops, flats, filberts, and wash brushes, which must hold a lot of water. The imitation of natural hair with synthetic filaments, particularly nylon and polyester, is a growing and fast developing field as natural hair is becoming scarcer. Challenges are the topography of fiber surfaces and the shape of fibers. For bristle imitations, the ends are mechanically tipped to reproduce the flag.

With fine hair imitations, fibers are tapered, which makes these synthetics retain their shape better. Filament surfaces are often roughened by abrasion, or etching to increase paint-carrying ability and are additionally dyed and baked to make them softer and more absorbent. The most common type of polyester used for brushes is PBT polybutylene terephthalate , which offers many of the same properties as nylon, but absorbs less water.

This allows PBT to hold its stiffness in wet applications. Watercolor brushes are best cleaned by rinsing in plenty of water, although some staining colors such as Phthalos might require some mild soap to clean completely.

Be sure to be gentle with any cleaning and rinse all of the soap from the brush before painting. Allow the watercolor brushes to dry with nothing touching the tip and if the handle is wood, avoid letting the brush dry upright, as that might encourage water to drain into the wood, swell it and ultimately, make the ferrule come lose. It helps to clean acrylic brushes with soap from time to time and to brush out paint that has collected at the heel of the brush with a dedicated nail scrubber.

Oil brushes should be wiped clean as much as possible with cotton rags or paper towels and then cleaned with mineral spirits or with drying oil such as linseed, as described in Cleaning Brushes Without Solvents. When using linseed oil for brush cleaning, the brushes have to be cleaned additionally with a mild soap and lukewarm water after the painting session.

Using oil to clean brushes is an aged-old technique and the dirty oil, which one ends up with, has the perfect soupy-brown color for creating colored oil grounds or painting the imprimatura. When storing away natural hair brushes for longer periods, place mothballs nearby. This means that water is used to thin down the paints while painting, and for rinsing the brushes during and after painting.

For deep cleaning acrylic paint brushes , wash with soap and water. That is their main similarity. Now to the differences! Similar to watercolor, you can use the white for highlights as well. The general consistency between the two is not far off. Those that come in pans make it very convenient to just jump in and paint right away. Those that come in tubes are found to be slightly more saturated than the pans.

Watercolor that has dried up on your mixing plate can simply be rehydrated with water and used again. While acrylic paint comes in tubes, tubs, bottles, and jars. There are also three levels of viscosity or thickness. The medium viscosity ones have the same consistency as oil paints. But if you want to paint with a lot of heavy texturing and brushwork, then go for the heavy bodied ones. Acrylic paint that has dried up cannot be rehydrated and will remain dry.

Watercolors have a great range of transparency. They can go from very transparent, sem-transparent, to opaque. The best way to use watercolors is by taking advantage of its levels of transparency. For me, no other medium can create the beautiful effects of vibrancy that you get by playing with the layers and layers of transparency.

Acrylics tend to be brighter than watercolors due to the usual manner of application. They can also be thinned down to a transparent or semi-transparent consistency, but the finish has a milky effect compared to the cleaner transparency of watercolor. For opaqueness, they are quite similar to oil paint. In fact, when I was in school it was heavily discouraged by my teachers.

The main reason is because when you mix white to your mixture, it will muddy the transparency and your colors will become more opaque. The only times I would use white was when I wanted to add opaque white highlights here and there. When painting with watercolor, you usually start by painting with the lighter colors and the lighter values. As you add each layer, the colors progressively become deeper and the values darker. One thing to remember is that watercolor tends to dry lighter. You start off by painting with the darker colors and then going towards the lighter ones as you progress.

Acrylic also has the tendency to dry darker. Just keep this in mind when mixing your colors, so you can allow for a little room for the darkening. For watercolor, it is highly recommended that you paint on paper. To be more specific, on watercolor paper as it is specially designed to absorb pigments and water properly. CharMing Art -- "Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art. I have used multi-purpose white synthetic brushes for traveling etc, and they work acceptably.

Not as nicely as a really good brush, but not so poorly I want to throw them across the studio either. I think Sterling Edwards even uses hog bristle brushes on his watercolors. I have several golden taklon and white nylon synthetics that are supposed to work for both.

Yes, I have just watched a Sterling Edwards video on brush techniques and all his brushes are synthetic. My website We must leave our mark on this world. Thanks for your responses. The only way I know is to try them. I usually use Black Velvet and Winsor Newton.

Therefore, depending on your particular technique, the synthetic brushes may work or not work for you. If you like to paint wet strokes on dry paper, and likes varied edges of a stroke, natural hair brush would work better for you. But if you like to wet the paper first then put on relative heavy concentration of pigments, stiffer synthetic or even hog-bristle haired brushes would work better for you, because they can grab more color when digging into the pigment well — after all they have harder hairs!

In the case of Sterling Edwards, or his mentor, master watercolorist Zoltan Szabo, the like to paint heavy pigments into soaking wet paper, therefore they really needed that stiffness of the hog bristles! This may or may not be the case for you. However, different synthetic hair brushes also have different stiffness.