BRUSH OF THE DAY

These are the brushes I have used today. Its a rubbish photograph but gives an idea of the sort of brushes I use. I have about fifty brushes of varying degrees of quality and all different sorts. Some I bought new and some I inherited from an ex painter. These and a few others are the ones I mainly use though and during any painting session I will reach for any of them and quite often have a whole bunch in my hand at once. I like to use synthetic flat brushes for laying down the initial stages of a painting and flatter natural bristle brushes for blending and layering. It might sound a bit mad, but I think brushes have their own personalities! Sometimes brushes can be lazy or they dont understand what I am looking for in the way of laying down the paint. Yes I know that sounds a bit bonkers but its true. Today i nearly gave up on a painting I have been working on for some time now and it was just not working. I walked away from it a few times and scraped things back a few layers but I was getting nowhere with it, it was just missing something and me and my brushes were getting pretty fed up. So I randomly started with a brush I dont use very often (its very light and the ferrule is loose and it feels a bit flimsy.) As soon as this little brush laid its first stokes on the doomed painting things changed and suddenly the painting was coming together. A short while later the painting was finished and the little brush had saved it from the scrap heap. I wonder if other painters have these experiences? Anyway. My brush of the day is the short flat one second in from the right. Thank you little brush.