 Synthetic Watercolor Paintbrushes
What does this mean anyway? No, it’s not like pseudo painting or anything like that. But, the story is kind of interesting if you are part of the ever shrinking populous of readers who cares to read on. Peaked your interest, did we? Ok, here’s the point. Fine artists paint brushes have been made from the natural hair from animals for centuries. Animals with great hair generally don’t do requests. So finding materials to make brushes has always been a challenge, along with being pretty darned expensive too. In a quest to try to make "the better paintbrush" technicians began experimenting with synthetic fibers like nylon. As you have probably noticed plastic is by in large much better at keeping water out than at keeping water in. There began the process of trying to find out how to make plastic fiber absorbent. What the brush makers finally found was… (our belief is this scientist was a woman) that synthetic fiber treated with a chemical, like an acid, caused the fiber to get little pits in the surface. Just like when you color your hair. It becomes extremely absorbent. Those little pits give the water/paint/color a place to sit on the brush hair until it is applied to the painting surface. (That woman was pretty clever, huh?) Then the paintbrush makers were left with the other characteristic that differentiates synthetic fiber from natural hair… split ends! Yes, the little split at the end of a hair makes for a great point on an art brush. Monofilament nylon doesn’t have that. The next step to solving this dilemma was to stack the fiber to artificially make a point. What results looks more like a steppe pyramid. Not exactly what they were hoping for. The real solution was a combination of stacking but using varying thicknesses of filament. This discovery not only created a nice point, but also gave synthetic paintbrushes a feel when painting much more like brushes with natural hair. So, when shopping for artists paint brushes now you know the whole story behind synthetic brushes. Not only is synthetic easier to catch than an animal, it’s less expensive and more durable to paint with. Okay, maybe it wasn’t worth reading all this, but it should help you become a better shopper for your art materials and thereby a better artist.
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