The lovely material. It can take a long time to find your favourite materials. The choice is almost endless and you can invest a lot of money in art materials this way, although I have to admit that it was fun trying things out. For me, the search for suitable brushes took a long time. I had a number of brands on the shelf and a wide variety of versions.
Basically, it is always a matter of taste and feeling which material you personally prefer to use. But I have also benefited from tips from other artists and from their experiences. That is why I think it is important to share my many years of experience in painting - almost 25 years - and to reveal something about my favorite work materials, without this being a promotional event. I don't get anything for it, I write here out of pure passion :-).
At some point, a good price-performance ratio became particularly important to me. Good quality at a reasonable price, because in my freelance work and as a full-time painter, I obviously need a lot of materials, especially brushes. And brushes, no matter how well they are looked after, wear out at some point, and in my case, quite quickly.
I currently work with round brushes, flat brushes and cat's tongue brushes. I use synthetic brushes for acrylic painting and bristle brushes for oil painting. Over the years I have noticed that the right tension of the brush hair is important. Not every cat's tongue brush behaves the same, even if it has the same hair length and is made of synthetic hair, for example. I have noticed that the tension of the brush hair can vary greatly and this has often caused me problems.
For example, I often struggled with the problem that, when using a brush with too much tension, I accidentally removed the paint I had just applied from the surface with the next brush stroke instead of applying the new paint. This annoyed me every time. In this case, the brush bristles were simply too stiff and acted like a scraper. My personal favorite brush - whether bristle or synthetic - has to have enough tension to allow me to apply the paint precisely and thickly, as well as to smoothly modulate the shape and not have to struggle with unruly brush bristles.
Over the years, the selection of brushes has become smaller and smaller and I currently only own brushes from two suppliers.
However, I had fewer problems with the bristle brushes and oil painting. These often had very similar properties. Sometimes there were bristle brushes whose bristles drifted apart like a bouquet of flowers after just a few brush strokes, even though I treated them carefully and they were declared for oil painting.
But now finally to the big secret, where I get my brushes from. I get my synthetic hair brushes exclusively from Paintersisters. An online shop with warehouse sales in Neuss. Unfortunately a bit far away for me, so I have only ordered online from there so far. I came across Paintersisters many years ago, by chance during my internet research. I use the "Soft Artist Brushes" series in particular for my acrylic work. I also used to work with their bristle brushes. Unfortunately, not all sizes are currently available.
There are also other materials there, such as paints. I can't say anything about that, as I've been into my paints for years. But I think that if you're starting out with painting or looking for paints for studies, you'll definitely find paints there to try out that won't break the bank when you buy them.
I have personally ordered things like a cutting board, blades, easels and even a suitcase easel from there, all of which were really top quality and have kept their promises for years. Paintersisters also impresses with incredible service and fast shipping.
So first source: paintersister-neuss.de
I get my bristle brushes and the brushes for painting preparation, such as priming my painting surfaces, from "Pinsel Frey". And it's an insider tip among us artists. But I'm not really sure how secret the whole thing still is :-). In any case, they have great bristle brushes. I used to use the varnish and bristle brush 108 with a width of 3 (5 cm) for all large-scale oil work. I used to create my large-format paintings with them. The brush, which is called a varnish brush, is really good, it had the right tension for me personally and was always looking for! In any case, Pinsel Frey has good brushes and other useful things too!
Have a look at Pinsel Frey: frey-pinsel.de
So much for my personal brush stars. If you didn't already know the suppliers, I hope that the brush range will enrich and be useful to you in the future and that you will perhaps find your personal favorite brushes there.